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Re:Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to sof... by cubefox on Thursday June 15, 2023 @08:21PM (#36349093)
What's wrong with describing some classes first with a UML diagram?
Re:Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to sof... by wiz21c on Friday June 16, 2023 @02:24AM (#36352258)
Nothing wrong, but code is already formal enough that you don't need a formal visual language (UML is not just a bunch of diagrams, it's a formal language). So yeah, a bit of drawing might help to understand, a few ideas from UML might help, but it's not like it is super necessary.

As said, the sequence diagram is a real plus because sequence information is not very well expressed by code, so that diagram has much added value.

I personnaly find UML hard to use becaues if you want to communicate your ideas precisely, you have to know much of its formalism and most often, people who read your drawings don't master its intricacies, so communication quality is no good...

Re:Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to sof... by throwaway290 on Friday June 16, 2023 @03:15AM (#36352674)
> code is already formal enough that you don't need a formal visual language

Code can be formal enough but in reality it is almost never formal enough. Many constraints can be expressed imperatively (eg. someone validates the number of related objects in the create view) and in unexpected places (across repositories and libraries and maybe not even in code but in some stored procedure). And then it is all in flux and can go away the moment you change your stack.

I don't know if UML is perfectly flexible (maybe?) but its sure benefit is a source of truth that does not depend on your implementation.

Re:Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to sof... by dragonwriter on Saturday June 17, 2023 @11:28AM (#36371057)
The fact that it doesn’t provide any benefit or make things particularly simpler than describing them in code and projecting them to UML if you need a visual diagram. Also, the fact that it is particularly counterproductive if I’m not coding in a pure class-based OOP language, since it presupposes that the solution is centered on class-based OOP.

There a diagrams that are useful before coding, but most of them aren’t part of UML, which is a product of the simultaneous highwater of class-based-OOP-is-everything and pre-Agile industrial software development methodologies, and (except for some isolated bits) poorly fit to anything else.