Nice. Perhaps an Obsidian plugin?
Nomnoml
21–30 of 165 posts
Re: Nomnoml
#22This was very confusing, until I found the 'about' button. I guess I'm leading a charmed life, because I can not recognise UML on sight? (I thought at first this was describing a grammar of fake pirate language or something.)
it's not really UML, at least not standard conform I think
through that's kinda true for a ton of tooling using the word "UML"
and in many case you also somewhat want something which is less precise (and verbose) then UML theoretically is
Re: Nomnoml
#23One of those "text to diagram" contenders did a comparison website (open source) a while back: https://text-to-diagram.com/ (nomnoml isn't in there).
Re: Nomnoml
#24this just triggers my entire spectrum of love for this text-to-diagram, but I always struggle with increasing difficulty managing content as the complexity grows.
Re: Nomnoml
#25Very cool! It blows my mind though how the moment that someone offers free stuff, the first comments are people asking for more free stuff. If I wasn't paid to work full time on open source software, I'd think very carefully about whether to do any open source work nowadays.
Nice comment! Could you please provide a few more details about what you mean exactly?
The first two comments (by timestamp) are one guy (OP) asking for an Obsidian plugin, and the second one is a guy asking for the implementation of swimlane diagrams.
Re: Nomnoml
#26This was very confusing, until I found the 'about' button. I guess I'm leading a charmed life, because I can not recognise UML on sight? (I thought at first this was describing a grammar of fake pirate language or something.)
it's not really UML, at least not standard conform I think through that's kinda true for a ton of tooling using the word "UML" and in many case you also somewhat want something which is less precise (and verbose) then UML theoretically is
> and in many case you also somewhat want something which is less precise (and verbose) then UML theoretically is
This tends to be "the" big problem with UML (and similar): Very few people care about, or have a reason to, stick 100% to UML. They want to "speak diagrams", and just like written or spoken language, our syntax and semantics is context dependent and dependent on the dialect and speech patterns and understanding of those we speak to.
So the "UML" people learn is often a dialect of sorts closer or further from the formal grammar, and a lot of tools fail to take that into account and try to force you into conformity. We accept that for programming languages, yet we still use pseudo-code in all kinds of contexts, but diagrams are one step up - one of the things we "escape to" when writing formal code is too complex or we want to explain things to people who don't know or care about the details.
There's a significant strain there between those conflicting goals of diagrams as communication, and the evolution of CASE tools that wants diagrams to be formal, that is much closer to how we deal with natural languages (people arguing over formal use vs. slang) than with programming languages, and it's fascinating.
Re: Nomnoml
#27These 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 appear approximately where you wish they would. Maybe it's not too bad for very simple diagrams but unmanageable for anything complex. All in all, I think it does not solve any problems and merely adds an additional layer of complexity.
Re: Nomnoml
#28These 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…
These markup languages are often not competing with "making a single diagram with drag&drop", though. Lets say you're making lots of variations, then having it in a specified format for easy changes is nice. Or diffing changes. Or programmatically generate them.
Re: Nomnoml
#29These 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…
Depends on the person I guess, I've actually found it easier to type out my diagrams.
Re: Nomnoml
#30One of those "text to diagram" contenders did a comparison website (open source) a while back: https://text-to-diagram.com/ (nomnoml isn't in there).
That site is created by the maintainers of D2[1], so it might be biased, but I still think D2 has the friendliest syntax of the bunch, including nomnoml.
[1]: https://d2lang.com/