I've made diagrams for my talks in both style (with code and with Inkscape or, these days, Lucidchart). Writing code to generate diagrams had a much larger setup cost but once I had it going, iterating on the diagrams became much easier.

I had a talk about radix trees[1] where I wrote some Haskell code that could take trees and generate diagrams from them. Getting the code right in the first place took a few hours but in this case it was clearly worth it in hindsight for two reasons:

1. I ended up with a lot of tree diagrams. Once the code was working, the marginal cost of adding an extra diagram went way down and I think that improved the talk as a whole.

2. Code made it much easier to iterate on my examples. I had an extended example[2] that I changed several times; if I had had to manually redo the diagrams for it each time, I would not have bothered.

These days, this trade-off (up-front vs ongoing costs) makes the decision reasonably easy. If I'm going to be making a single diagram and I don't expect to change it much, I'll do it manually; if I'm going to be making a series of similar or related diagrams or if I expect to iterate on the diagrams a lot, I'll write some code for them. So far, I haven't regretted following this approach in either case :).

[1]: https://jelv.is/talks/lambda-world-2018/slides.html#/sec-tit...

[2]: https://jelv.is/talks/lambda-world-2018/slides.html#/slide-o...

This is interesting. I am working on a tool (sourcespy.com) to create diagrams specifically because maintaining large diagrams in Inkscape and Lucidchart is cumbersome. Another pain is grouping the nodes. I wish there was something interactive where care about semantics and tool takes care of node arrangement.

Thanks for this! Ceating multiple slightly different diagrams manually is indeed a painpoint.

One thing I like about textual diagramming tools (in code like this project or in a markup dsl) is I can version control and diff changes.

Fair! Do you build workflows around the diffs themselves (collaborate, review, update)? I can already put my svgs in version control and have history/versions. But I've never felt compelled to look at a textual diff of viz code.

Yes, absolutely.

SVG is lower level than I'd want to do this with though - instead of comparing things like individual paths and fill colors, a dsl at the right abstraction level lets you compare things like adding a server to a load balancer in a network topology diagram.