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Comment by osigurdson | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don’t think it was that bad. They should have just kept it to class and sequence diagrams however. As the author states, adding all of this unnecessary standardization around things no one uses was pretty ridiculous. Also various people clearly took things too far with laughable round tripping tools.

In the end, UML is fundamentally unimportant. I think having a strong opinion about it (either way) doesn’t make sense for this reason.

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The problem is that UML was forced upon a lot of people who basically didn't need it. At some point simply saying "Meh, it is not for me" doesn't cut it, you have to actually fight back to prevent the brain rot that the marketing is causing.

If university students are being taught that UML is a must-use tool, it doesn't really matter whether or not UML has some legitimate use cases, the base teaching is a big fat lie and the students would have been better off spending that time playing Candy Crush.

I remember state diagrams being very useful. But I'm not sure if it was much older than other UML artifacts and just "adopted" for completeness.

Harel statecharts date to the 80s.

All of the UML diagrams are some formalization of older ideas.

Activity diagrams can be very useful as well, and you can mix and match various UML elements in them, it's a very flexible visual language. Also state diagrams, of course, as a sibling already noted.

I can recommend Martin Fowler's "UML Distilled" for a pragmatic approach (ISBN 9780321193681).

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