Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nomnoml

nomnoml.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 165 posts

Re: Nomnoml

#131

Post by p1mrx »

Veuxdo wrote: post #79
ororroro wrote: post #38

Getting a good layout is too dependent on the order of definition. I can see that becoming unsolvable for the user for large diagrams but seems ok for small ones. For example the following gives an ugly yet valid layout of the example: [more loot] no ->[ e] [ start] -> [ plunder] -> [ more loot] -> [start] [Pirate| [foul mouth] mischief| bawl | sing || yell | drink ] [ Marauder] Jolly;Sailor] [sailor]->[rum] [Pirate]…

This pirate example is not doing us any favors. Is there a way to arrange these jumble of words in a way that makes any sense?

Arrr, it be fine as it be, now sail off ye scallywag.

Re: Nomnoml

#133

Post by dangets »

zoogeny wrote: post #121
ororroro wrote: post #38

Getting a good layout is too dependent on the order of definition. I can see that becoming unsolvable for the user for large diagrams but seems ok for small ones. For example the following gives an ugly yet valid layout of the example: [more loot] no ->[ e] [ start] -> [ plunder] -> [ more loot] -> [start] [Pirate| [foul mouth] mischief| bawl | sing || yell | drink ] [ Marauder] Jolly;Sailor] [sailor]->[rum] [Pirate]…

One problem with these tools is that even if you manage to get a good layout for a document then as soon as you need to add/remove/update then you have to wrestle with them all over again. I've used a few of these code-as-diagram products because I dream of a world where technical documentation, including diagrams, are part of the source code of a project. But my experience is that getting acceptable layouts, especia…

I've thought the same quite a bit.

On one end of the spectrum you could use something like SVG if there were standard or dominant tools used to import/export, but then you lose the ascii readability benefit of tools like this, dot, or d2.

It'd be nice to have a mixed text & GUI editor for something like Pikchr diagrams.

https://pikchr.org/home/doc/trunk/homepage.md

https://d2lang.com/

Re: Nomnoml

#134

Post by sBqQu3U0wH »

perrygeo wrote: post #94
sBqQu3U0wH wrote: post #27

These tools show up from time to time here, and I can appreciate the technical side of things and effort put into building the tool. However, I cannot imagine using something like this in practice - either at work or for my own uses. It's so much easier just to select, drag and drop graphical elements instead of spending time learning a specific markup language and typing everything out, hoping that the elements will…

> It's so much easier just to select, drag and drop graphical elements instead of spending time learning a specific markup language and typing everything out You state this like a fact. A GUI might be your personal preference but markup is preferred by many. It takes me an order of magnitude longer to learn where all the buttons are than it does to internalize markdown syntax from a few good examples. In a GUI you sp…

>There's an analogy to programming: sure we have visual programming tools but who uses them?

I really don't think this is a good analogy. Clearly presenting an idea / architecture / model / workflow at a high level by creating a graphical representation is quite different than making an application does a lot of things at a low level (e.g. handling user interactions, processing data, providing GUI, communicating with other systems, handling errors).

I agree there may be some benefits to that but I guess it also depends on what kind of diagrams you are making. For example, I would never ever draw UML diagrams in markup. I want to be in control how elements look, where they are placed, where and how lines are drawn and where and how they are shown. In my experience, automatic placement even on GUI diagramming tools suck 99.9% of the time.

Re: Nomnoml

#135

Post by vekker »

Cerium wrote: post #130
vekker wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use PlantUML a lot, for communicating complex technical designs for juniors to implement for example, or simply for documentation. It's nice to have your diagrams as readable code which you can check in with the rest of your git repository and embed in READMEs, and the syntax is really intuitive and easy to learn. I haven't made the comparison with this particular tool yet, but in general I'd recommend this practic…

I have been using PlantUML a lot. For me the effort of drawing a diagram in an external tool and then exporting it seems like such a waste compared to adding source code that compiles into the diagram I need. As a nice bonus, GPT-4 is pretty good at generating valid PlantUML. I have given descriptions of the diagram I want and gotten results that have gone into docs unchanged.

Yep, GPT is nice for speeding up the process. I've gotten in the habit of actually speaking out loud the desired flow of events in a system and transcribing it, and then turning that text into sequence diagrams with GPT4.

Re: Nomnoml

#136

Post by sBqQu3U0wH »

saberience wrote: post #32

I have a hard time understanding why any engineering team I've ever worked on would use this. Can someone sell this idea to me? Seems like a waste of time when you can knock up fast and easier to understand diagrams with something like Miro which also can be done in a multi-user environment.

To each their own I guess, some people like doing it this way, so good for them. I personally wouldn't use this either, as I find GUI tools faster and easier to use.

Re: Nomnoml

#137

Post by MilStdJunkie »

zoogeny wrote: post #121
ororroro wrote: post #38

Getting a good layout is too dependent on the order of definition. I can see that becoming unsolvable for the user for large diagrams but seems ok for small ones. For example the following gives an ugly yet valid layout of the example: [more loot] no ->[ e] [ start] -> [ plunder] -> [ more loot] -> [start] [Pirate| [foul mouth] mischief| bawl | sing || yell | drink ] [ Marauder] Jolly;Sailor] [sailor]->[rum] [Pirate]…

One problem with these tools is that even if you manage to get a good layout for a document then as soon as you need to add/remove/update then you have to wrestle with them all over again. I've used a few of these code-as-diagram products because I dream of a world where technical documentation, including diagrams, are part of the source code of a project. But my experience is that getting acceptable layouts, especia…

If you don't mind my asking, what aspects of "acceptable layout" is usually the first to get busted? Do the fonts overstrike? Does it shrink down so small the lines don't render? Is it just that all the boxes get thrashed in a blender and the diagram looks completely different?

I'm extremely excited about using WireViz[1] to automate wiring harness diagram creation, and if I can, I'd like to know the speedbumps before I hit them. I'm thinkin generous linking between diagrams will be one path - keep the individual diagrams fairly small in scope, link 'em together.

[1] Project:: https://github.com/wireviz/WireViz SandboxP:: https://kroki.io/#try [select Diagram>WireViz]

Re: Nomnoml

#138

Post by jldugger »

MilStdJunkie wrote: post #137
zoogeny wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem with these tools is that even if you manage to get a good layout for a document then as soon as you need to add/remove/update then you have to wrestle with them all over again. I've used a few of these code-as-diagram products because I dream of a world where technical documentation, including diagrams, are part of the source code of a project. But my experience is that getting acceptable layouts, especia…

If you don't mind my asking, what aspects of "acceptable layout" is usually the first to get busted? Do the fonts overstrike? Does it shrink down so small the lines don't render? Is it just that all the boxes get thrashed in a blender and the diagram looks completely different? I'm extremely excited about using WireViz[1] to automate wiring harness diagram creation, and if I can, I'd like to know the speedbumps befor…

In my experience with graphviz, the two layout problems are:

1. the lines are not distinct -- they can bunch up and overlap, making them untraceable 2. Logical groupings are hard to maintain unless they are highly connected.

Re: Nomnoml

#139

Post by jldugger »

saberience wrote: post #32

I have a hard time understanding why any engineering team I've ever worked on would use this. Can someone sell this idea to me? Seems like a waste of time when you can knock up fast and easier to understand diagrams with something like Miro which also can be done in a multi-user environment.

Three reasons:

1. I want changes to the diagram to be peer reviewable and understandable. 2. I want something else to manually lay out things, rather than have to adjust it personally on every addition or change. 3. I want a parsable structure I can feed into grafana or similar, so I can decorate the graph with metric data. It seems like it would be cool to have a graph of RPC calls and which links were red.

Re: Nomnoml

#140

Post by cdchn »

h0l0cube wrote: post #73
jiehong wrote: post #13

Looks nice, and much nicer from plantuml class diagrams [0]. [0]: https://plantuml.com/class-diagram

Might be. But instead of another fragmentary standard can't we make the already reasonably supported one look better by default?

Maybe theres an opportunity for, instead of Yet-Another-Text-To-Diagram-DSL we could make a diagram styling store ala WordPress themes.
Post reply on HN