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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

Hand drawn. I like the idea of building diagrams I just tend to find that:

* It's a lot of work to make them look right.

* They become outdated SO quickly. They're dangerously misleading as often as they're useful.

* Lots of people like to create diagrams, nobody likes to maintain.

Hand drawn dated diagrams have a sort of built in advantage that people will assume that it's not been kept up to date, especially if it's scruffy. Also they're quick.

I like the idea of generated diagrams better than drawn diagrams but unfortunately the software just isn't there yet.

Even when you can do it, they usually look shit because the program won't layout nearly (e.g. E/R) and you can't integrate changes to the source (e.g. tables) to annotations/tweaks.

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Agreed! Hand drawn is quicker, way more flexible, and everyone knows how to do it.

It has a built in version control system: get a new piece of paper and keep the old one.

There is immense power in "reciting" the diagram in front of someone on a new piece of paper or whiteboard. It's essentially adding a whole new dimension to your diagram, as well as space for discussion and interaction along the way. I've not seen someone pull this off well in any electronic format.

Spending time refining diagrams is what you do when you're writing a thesis or book. You have to be very careful when designing your diagrams this way. But it's a complete waste of time when the diagram is for software under development. Those diagrams can and will become outdated very quickly.

Lately I have been wondering whether a "fear" (for want of a better word) of hand-drawn diagrams are causing diagrams in general to be under-used. We're used to having everything typed, TeX:ed, machine drawn, perfect, and we want our diagrams to look like that, too, but using drawing software is hard and time consuming, so we don't diagram at all. But we could just whip out pencil and paper! You don't have to be an artist to draw some boxes and arrows. And the problem of archiving and revision control is solved now that everyone has a digital camera in their pocket (and a JPEG file of an A4/letter page isn't very big by today's standards).

The best planning experiences I've had in a team were when everything was done on a whiteboard and photographed for posterity. Architecture planning, kanban board, UI mockups, everything - it was a joy not having to wrestle opinionated tools into doing what we wanted.

Since I have a tablet and stylus I started sending/showing a lot more diagrams. It's easier to share and looks cleaner than a photo of a paper.

I use Microsoft research’s Lens. It’s amazing for taking pics of whiteboards and drawings and making it look much better than a photo of paper.

Hand drawn diagrams often have a clarity still elusive in diagramming software.

But we have found that working together in real time -- making a diagram together -- is an incredibly efficient way to strategize about how to solve whatever problem at hand, and then come away with a shared understanding so we can work together on the execution.

We use Plectica[1]. Another popular one is Miro[2].

[1]: https://beta.plectica.com

[2]: https://miro.com

Yea, I like the idea of having freely draw diagrams where you aren't constrained to a certain syntax. I used to only do hand drawn diagrams until we started using miro at my company. It's really intuitive and the simplicity and the control just make it so much faster and easier to generate and maintain diagrams. It's been great for design and has been useful for debugging issues in unfamiliar architecture.

Simple Diagrams is great for this. Can vouche for it.

===

https://www.simplediagrams.com/

Some of the diagrams are not viable to draw by hand. Statecharts for eg, derives much of their expressivity from the ability to nest them without limit. Such nested Statecharts require a system which can collapse/expand nested levels, and hand drawn diagrams cannot do that.

But hand drawn diagrams are invisible to people with visual deficiencies.

Usually, plantuml source is more readable, and it’s just almost like writing a list so it’s not too much work.

The topic is about diagrams, though. The point is using visual aids to help with development so that implies being able to see stuff. If I had a visually impaired developer on my team then of course I would make other provisions, but I would still draw diagrams for myself and other members.

I don't find plantuml at all readable as a DSL.

I like the idea of some sort of textual dsl that generates diagrams just not that one and ideally not a UML focused one.

Have you looked at Ilograph? Its DSL is much nicer than PlantUML and isn't UML-focused.

> it’s just almost like writing a list so it’s not too much work.

But written lists are worthless to people who are illiterate

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