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Nomnoml

nomnoml.com

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Re: Nomnoml

#41

Post by zozbot234 »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #37
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…

Reasons to make the effort to do this in markup: 1. You can build tools to automatically generate these diagrams from existing software quite easily. I've used tools like this to generate diagrams that were impractical documentation (150+ sheets of A4 when printed), but showed class or module dependency hotspots in a way that would have taken weeks to understand from the code alone: a picture speaks a thousand words,…

> You can build tools to automatically generate these diagrams from existing software quite easily.

FWIW, Doxygen does diagrams-from-code out of the box. It's mostly a code documentation/literate programming tool, but also useful for these reverse engineering tasks starting from an existing codebase.

Re: Nomnoml

#42

Post by [deleted] »

mactavish88 wrote: post #17
thangngoc89 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the point of posting/ commenting on HN? So that we can discuss about the post? I see something on HN and after checking it, I would definitely comment on HN first.

As someone who has been working on open source software for 5 years now, GitHub issues are my primary source of truth for what users want and how to go about prioritizing features. If people can’t be bothered to log an issue or thumbs-up/comment on an existing one, it can’t be such an important thing to them.

[deleted]

Re: Nomnoml

#43

Post by zimpenfish »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #37
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…

Reasons to make the effort to do this in markup: 1. You can build tools to automatically generate these diagrams from existing software quite easily. I've used tools like this to generate diagrams that were impractical documentation (150+ sheets of A4 when printed), but showed class or module dependency hotspots in a way that would have taken weeks to understand from the code alone: a picture speaks a thousand words,…

7. You can put them in the source where they are relevant.

Got a hairy state machine? Stick a comment at the top with something like nomnoml's syntax and anyone can follow what's going on without having to trace through the code.

Re: Nomnoml

#44

Post by dkobia »

mactavish88 wrote: post #4

Very 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.

Thankfully many open source projects stem from people solving for their own problems then benevolently sharing their solution. It isn’t for everyone and we are all grateful for their contributions.

Re: Nomnoml

#45

Post by layer8 »

vidarh wrote: post #26
dathinab wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 underst…

It’s a pity, because one benefit of UML would be that everyone speaks the same language. Before UML, there were many different modeling notations [0], and the goal with UML was to create a single interoperable unified language. This was successful insofar as it displaced the previous object modeling languages. However, it would be nice to have that benefit of a modeling lingua franca not only in modeling tools, but for casual usage as well.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-modeling_language

Re: Nomnoml

#46

Post by pja »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #10

Probably needs some work on mobile — went there on a phone and the diagram was drawn on top of the editor, making the latter unusable.

That’s just the nomnomml demo website - the text is editable so that you can see live updates in the rendered UML diagram.

The underlying js library will render straight to an HTML canvas or to SVG from a Node.js program. You can run it from the command line if you want to.

Re: Nomnoml

#47

Post by oblio »

waveBidder wrote: post #11
oblio wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice comment! Could you please provide a few more details about what you mean exactly?

it's hard to tell if you're mocking the grandparent or people making feature requests

Well, kind of both :-)

Re: Nomnoml

#48

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

pja wrote: post #46
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #10

Probably needs some work on mobile — went there on a phone and the diagram was drawn on top of the editor, making the latter unusable.

That’s just the nomnomml demo website - the text is editable so that you can see live updates in the rendered UML diagram. The underlying js library will render straight to an HTML canvas or to SVG from a Node.js program. You can run it from the command line if you want to.

I know it is editable, it's just inconvenient af to edit the text if the diagram is being drawn right over it.

Re: Nomnoml

#50

Post by bmacho »

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]…

edit: I thought that it goes top to down, but no, it determines order other ways. Original Pirate table:

  [Pirate|
    [beard]--[parrot]
    [beard]-:>[foul mouth]
  ]
parent posts Pirate table

  [Pirate|
    [foul mouth]
this is upside down. Defining beard and parrot the order we want them to appear doesn't help:

  [Pirate|
    [beard]
    [parrot]
    [foul mouth]
    [foul mouth]
it is still upside down.
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