161–165 of 165 posts
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Well, right now I have graphviz dot which should be enough to load in and transform as needed into whatever DSL desired.
I don't think anything that I'm aware of converts graphviz dot files into Grafana Node Panels but it would be a good project if someone did it.
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The way to recognise UML is by the wide variety of arrow styles that nobody can remember. I'm 90% sure that's the main reason it didn't catch on. You have to learn UML because of the stupid arrows. Compare it to something like this which acknowledges the fact that nobody is going to casually memorise 10 different styles of arrow just to read occasional UML diagrams: https://buck2.build/docs/concepts/concept_map/ Much…
No one forces you to use all possible arrows, you can learn just one, and use that. When reading a diagram, ideally you would read it by looking at the generated diagram, not text, as that's the entire point, but even when reading the raw text, it's apparent where the arrows are, based on "less than" and "greater than" characters, no?
Not if you want to read other people's UML diagrams, which is rather the point.
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The issue with graph engines that manage the layout themselves is that it becomes very messy the higher the number of nodes you have. I've experienced this with Mermaid.js and Obsidian.
Still, I'd rather have textual hints about layout than explicit drag-and-drop. Stuff like "boxes a1, a2, a3 should be presented sequentially" or "box b1, b2, b3 are tightly related and should be presented close to each other" and "box c is the root of its tree" and stuff like that.
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…