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Comment by necovek | Hacker News Reader

I'll go on a limb and share a counter-point for why I struggle with diagrams: it's anecdotal but might help someone else accept that diagrams are not for everyone.

As someone with aphantasia, they don't help me memorize relationships, so to get them into my working memory, I have to translate a diagram into bullet points: it's so much easier just to start with those bullet points of what components we've got, what they consist of and what relationships they have (you know, just like code itself).

And having done theoretical (read: abstract) maths too, that's good enough for me to work with complex and intricate relationships.

I still understand that it's not like that for most everybody else, but for some minority of us, they are just a bad way to write text/thoughts out as the graphical layout has no benefits. Yes, you do learn to read and create them, but it's an extra effort that you do for others' benefit.

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I think I am a highly visual person but I don't like diagrams either. There is a somewhat interesting historical irony around the development of architecture as in how this word is meant in IT and what a real architect does. The famous gang of four design patterns book got it's name from a book by the architect Christopher Alexander called a Pattern Language. This book advocates using textual description for user requirements like "I want to be able to drink my coffee in the morning and watch the sun rise". It sort of constrains the layout of the house but it still leaves a lot of room to move things around.

Interestingly, as someone with aphantasia they're absolutely critical for me - because I'm not able to visualise the relationships without a diagram in from of me to "see" (This was the same for me with more abstract undergraduate maths, too). Given just the bullet points I find it hard to conceptualise the relationships between them without quickly forgetting the points I'm not directly loooking at.

I echo your point that diagrams are not the solution for everyone (and that a multimodal representation of relationships is clearly best), I just find it fascinating how even with something as specific as aphantasia, there is still so much variability as to how it's experienced.

I’m not sure aphantasia is the issue here. I have aphantasia but I find good architecture diagrams useful, and I regularly draw them. I don’t need to be able to visualize them with my eyes closed to use them - instead, just look at the diagram. They’re intended to be referenced, that’s why they’re useful.

As such, I’m not sure that “memorizing relationships” is their goal. As the OP article says, communication is one goal. But also, drawing a diagram is a lot like writing - it forces you to think about what you’re documenting and often uncovers points that need to be addressed.

Bullet points can’t really capture what a diagram can - you need to represent other relationships in addition to the simple hierarchical structure that bullet point provide. If you use a diagramming tool with a DSL, you’ll see this in the diagram definition - it starts to become difficult to read a non-trivial diagram in textual form, because of relationships between different parts of the text.

I’m not suggesting that you should find diagrams useful, but I think that what you’re looking for from them may not be their main purpose.

Yeah, I don't claim aphantasia is the reason I don't find them generally useful: it's just that what some people might get (work back from a diagram on their mind to relationships) is not there as one potential benefits of diagrams.

But no, what I am saying is that diagrams can't capture what a textual description can (for me[1]): like I struggled to accept that anyone can find diagrams useful for years, believe me that a diagram defined with a nice diagramming DSL works better for me. Or, you know, bullet points: I can put those into my working memory and work with that.

Maybe it's my history as well: started with DOS and reluctant to switch to Windows having only used 3.11 for Internet, so after a short stint in NT, moved full time to Linux, doing everything with DSLs: printer escape sequences, AT commands, plain TeX for typesetting... — this is all early to mid primary school.

[1] Obviously, as there are textual representations of diagrams, they are an equivalence class.

I agree. I don't have aphantasia but most of the time when I look at an architectural diagram it feels like I'm looking at nothing at all.

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