[HN Gopher] Why UML "Really" Died
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Why UML "Really" Died
Author : onemoresoop
Score : 17 points
Date : 2022-09-09 20:11 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (buttondown.email)
(TXT) w3m dump (buttondown.email)
| Thetawaves wrote:
| I considered the explanation was simply that diagrams created in
| UML are unreadable to lay persons.
|
| Excessive use of visual jargon, and changing standards combine to
| make everybody a lay person, even those versed in a particular
| version of UML when confronted with a different version.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| They are pretty trivial to understand.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| > Over the past two decades, though, software culture shifted
| progressively towards large tech-first companies and startups.
|
| I think that this is also part of the reason why there has been a
| shift away from design patterns (e.g. Gang of Four, Patterns of
| Enterprise Application Architecture): the training that it
| required to be a proficient software engineer 20 years ago isn't
| the same as it is now.
|
| No StackOverflow, no YouTube, a lot of documentation still on
| paper, etc.
|
| So you'd get a CS degree, read, learn, and apply the knowledge.
|
| That formula has inverted.
|
| Nowadays, you can build and learn along the way. Watch a tutorial
| and learn "just-in-time". But this also means that there's really
| no reason to get into complex topics like modeling, "formal"
| diagramming, and even design patterns.
| arinlen wrote:
| > _I think that this is also part of the reason why there has
| been a shift away from design patterns (...)_
|
| There is no such shift. Design patterns are ubiquitous and more
| popular than ever. Some frameworks explicitly base their added
| value on providing a specific design pattern.
|
| A design pattern is a higher level construct. It makes
| absolutely no sense to claim that there's a shift away from
| higher level constructs when the whole point of programming is
| using a lower-level programming language to implement higher-
| level abstractions that implement our requirements.
| monksy wrote:
| It's not just the resources we have today, in yesteryear we had
| the MSDN that had an annual subscription and release, we had
| more books etc.
|
| Today, there are promotions and aggressive business fighting of
| formalization within our field. People who slow down and plan
| out systems have been weeded out of organizations. People who
| make things and "ship" quickly are rewarded.
|
| This has been the same with quality control in software, and
| even goes down to bad developers refusing to unit test.
|
| Time to being promoted has shortened as well. Now it's not
| unusual for a dev to be a senior within 2-3 years. Lead in 5.
| That's just the start of their career. I haven't heard the last
| time that the title "Jr" was used.
|
| > Build and learn along the way
|
| It's always been that way but you had a lot more oversight from
| people that were much more senior.
| Fiahil wrote:
| > I think that this is also part of the reason why there has
| been a shift away from design patterns
|
| Citation needed.
|
| I see, use and teach design patterns every day, and I work with
| Data Scientists.
| ShuffleBoard wrote:
| Meh UML was always the Sun Chips of the software world.
|
| https://www.theonion.com/sun-chips-abandons-biodegradable-ba...
|
| "Are you kidding me? I crafted my entire freshman year persona
| around being the 'Sun Chips Asshole.'"
|
| PAUL KENEMORE * STUDENT
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Sequence diagrams are still widely used.
|
| Use-case diagrams should be used more.
|
| Class diagrams are good to reveal poor OOP designs.
| kieranmaine wrote:
| UML may be dead but I still use sequence diagrams. They're great
| for visualising complex code and systems, especially if you're
| new to a system and are trying to gain an understanding the flow
| of data.
|
| I've used mermaid and plant UML and both seem to powerful enough
| for my use cases, especially when used in conjunction with the
| preview mode in VS Code.
| jmfldn wrote:
| Was messing with mermaid and state diagrams only today. I don't
| use UML as a whole but some of the diagrams are really useful.
| chowells wrote:
| Sequence diagrams are great. Any time there's a multi-stage
| interaction with multiple independent pieces involved, they're
| hard to beat for communication.
|
| It's not like UML was based on bad ideas. There were just too
| many cases where the added value was less than the added cost.
| But when a diagram does add net value it's great to have
| conventions already.
| riedel wrote:
| Posted 1 year ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956298
|
| Also interesting is the linked post:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26934577
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| UML is too formal for the quick and dirty world of low profile
| software projects.
|
| In whiteboard examples, most people tend to come up with their
| own "dialect" of UML relational graphs anyway. Not to mention the
| ease of defining skeleton classes.
|
| UML is too trivial to be a standard, feels like a byproduct of
| the 90s OOP craze.
|
| As long as it gets the point across, who cares?
| flarg wrote:
| Controversial opinion incoming ... The people who should use UML
| are too lazy to learn it and instead draw weak abstractions in
| PowerPoint or C4. Those people are business analysts/requirement
| engineers/product owners. The true value of UML is that it
| reduces ambiguity and constrains risk through lightweight
| prototyping. Wireframes do the same thing. But not one PO can
| resist writing reams of non descriptive text and drawing
| impossible data flows. Developers are not the people who should
| draw UML.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I hated UML because it felt like someone "very important" had
| issued a commandment from that unless you did software with UML
| then you were DOING IT WRONG (spoken in a booming voice from the
| sky).
|
| It felt super academic and "Thoughtworks"ish and Javaish and made
| software development boring instead of dynamic and fun.
|
| Glad its gone.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| "I don't want to think, I want to pump tech debt and be the
| managers' favorite tech debt fairy, waahhh. Why do you want to
| turn software engineering into a serious occupation? I want to
| lower entry barriers and depress my own wage, waaaah."
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I'm not sure where this notion of UML diagrams as a silver
| bullet against technical debt is coming from. The whole OOAD
| development methodology that UML adoption was predicated on
| is the opposite of serious or rigorous; you can't just
| translate domain-level "objects" into a design and expect to
| end up with something sensible, that's not how it works. (In
| fact, unless some well-defined part of a system really has
| meaningful invariants that it cares about and should
| preserve, there's arguably not much of a real reason to even
| make an "object" out of it.)
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| I tend to agree with this. If UML or something UML-like
| offers value in terms of understandability at some level of
| abstraction as a substitute for needing to hold the
| detailed mental model of the entire explicit implementation
| in one's head, then using it as something extracted from
| the implementation to provide a simplified sketch of it
| makes more sense than using it as an input artifact to
| creating the implementation.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| If you are a tech debt fairy, your main source of comfort
| is lack of visibility.
|
| No audits, low visibility = perfect for the velocity
| contest champs.
|
| The more visibility on how deliberately unmaintainable and
| duct taped your shit is, the worst for you.
|
| Your bet is that by the time someone audits your shit you
| are already a manager that doesn't have to code anymore.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I don't even understand what this means.
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