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Nomnoml

nomnoml.com

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Re: Nomnoml

#81

Post by Veuxdo »

fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #76
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…

I use mermaid sequence diagrams all the time and much prefer them to using whatever app. GitHub can render them which is nice. Refactoring them is easier than dragging 20 boxes around too in my opinion. I've done a couple Gantt charts. I see they support c4 which I need to try. We don't have many options of approved diagramming software where I work though. Omnigraffle which I don't care much for, and Visio which doe…

Have you looked at Ilograph? It's diagrams-as-code that supports first-class sequence diagrams. E.g. https://app.ilograph.com/demo.ilograph.Ilograph/Get%2520diag...

Re: Nomnoml

#82

Post by planede »

hnbad wrote: post #15
rurban wrote: post #14

The last e label is missing in this sample

Neither the end node nor the start node have a visible label. I suspect this is intentional but they shouldn't take a label argument then.

The label seems to serve as a reference. If have `-> [a]` and `-> [b]` then that's different than having two instances of `-> [a]` from different source nodes.

Being able to visibly label them would still make a lot of sense.

Re: Nomnoml

#83

Post by xdennis »

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…

> Maybe it's not too bad for very simple diagrams but unmanageable for anything complex.

Yeah, the problem with these sort of layout algorithms is that they don't have a sense of proportionality.

I wonder if LLM can do this better. I've tried with 5 relations from this example one and ChatGPT comes up with this:

    Place "Jolly Sailor" at point (1, 1).
    Place "Pirate" at point (2, 1).
    Place "rum" at point (3, 2).
    Place "mischief" at point (2, 0).
    Place "Marauder" at point (3, 0).
It looks okay, but I haven't checked with anything more complicated.

Re: Nomnoml

#84

Post by Angostura »

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.

And you get a different subset of new potential users on HN who wouldn't be aware of the project on or off GitHub.

Re: Nomnoml

#85

Post by candiddevmike »

fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #76
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…

I use mermaid sequence diagrams all the time and much prefer them to using whatever app. GitHub can render them which is nice. Refactoring them is easier than dragging 20 boxes around too in my opinion. I've done a couple Gantt charts. I see they support c4 which I need to try. We don't have many options of approved diagramming software where I work though. Omnigraffle which I don't care much for, and Visio which doe…

I wish there was a way to easily export mermaid diagrams to PNG or PDF. Right now sharing the diagrams, especially ones that scroll, is a pain in the ass.

Re: Nomnoml

#86

Post by Veuxdo »

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…

From last year: It’s Time to Drop Drag-and-Drop Architecture Diagramming [0]

[0]https://www.ilograph.com/blog/posts/its-time-to-drop-drag-an...

Re: Nomnoml

#87

Post by laserbeam »

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…

I once worked on a project where the state of a file was basically a graph (similar to programming languages where users actually manipulate an AST). Our tests would simulate changes on that graph and check invariants every for every build. We'd spend hours of our weeks looking at long logs describing steps to reproduce a thing.

One day, someone on our team had the brilliant idea to log the state of the program as a dot graphviz text file and just render it with the tool. Our debugging effort was instant all of a sudden.

Sometimes these tools are amazing at visualizing data more than at building diagrams. It's surprisingly easy to generate valid text files programmatically. Note that I'm talking in general about this class of tools, not nomnoml specifically.

Re: Nomnoml

#88

Post by j-a-a-p »

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.

> It blows my mind though how the moment that someone offers free stuff...

Try to launch a free service for consumers and experience how they are entitled to stuff just because you offer this service.

Re: Nomnoml

#89

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

dan_mctree wrote: post #77
mactavish88 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those who log issues are the hardcore users crowd that are bothered by something small, whereas new potential users that bounce because of something important generally don't bother making issues. You may be missing out on a lot of critical issues such as limited documentation and confusing API aspects by ignoring other channels of communication.

This is probably true, but it's also bad.

It's generally pretty easy to look at the tone of how recent issues are handled and know if the maintainer is drowning and would prefer that you keep the noise down, versus whether they're likely to feel energized by interacting with enthusiastic users.

You don't have to be hardcore to leave helpful feedback. If you think it's the latter, go file an issue.

Re: Nomnoml

#90

Post by Savely »

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]…

We need another tool that would optimise permutation of statements for least overlap in the resulting diagram.
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