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I'm not sure I agree with "it doesn't scale". It scales just as well as writing code by hand does!

PlantUML/mermaidjs do hit a sweet spot IMO, of having the chart defined as plaintext but rendering a pretty picture. The only way these could be improved IMO is if the ascii "code" for the diagram was also an actual diagram you could understand without running it through the parser.

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I should clarify what I mean with scaling. I was trying to describe complexity of maintaining the illustration for the complexity of what it is illustrating.

For ASCII art, this is far from linear, in most of the examples shown.

Consider some of the more complex ones shown in the linked article. The minor added complexity of adding a field, suddenly might mean you need to remake parts, or even entire visual art for it to stay congruent. You'll have software engineers hitting spacebar a few hundred times just to align things right. With proper tools, you'd just add the field, and that's it.

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