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Comment by saberience | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time understanding why any engineering team I've ever worked on would use this. Can someone sell this idea to me? Seems like a waste of time when you can knock up fast and easier to understand diagrams with something like Miro which also can be done in a multi-user environment.

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These mark up languages like PlantUML/Mermaid are diffable, mergeable, and can sit there in the repo right next to the code it's designing for. Many IDEs and cloud repositories support displaying them. Not sure if that's the case for nomnoml though.

One advantage for me, is that systems like this let me think only about relationships. This is particularly good when designing, or exploring how to think about an existing system. So for me, I get into a flow state, just connecting the dots logically. Even better: I can adjust the diagram just by adjusting the relationships.

Miro and others, I am always thinking visually. It's another step removed from the real thought process.

As you point out, these systems sometimes produce difficult to read diagrams. For particularly important communications, I will re-draw these in draw.io, or a similar sort of tool. But then I am thinking more about presentation, rather than relationship design and the tool is better for the job.

Three reasons:

1. I want changes to the diagram to be peer reviewable and understandable. 2. I want something else to manually lay out things, rather than have to adjust it personally on every addition or change. 3. I want a parsable structure I can feed into grafana or similar, so I can decorate the graph with metric data. It seems like it would be cool to have a graph of RPC calls and which links were red.

>I want a parsable structure I can feed into grafana or similar, so I can decorate the graph with metric data.

I don't think this can do it, but it would be cool if it could.

Maybe someone can make another diagramming DSL for the Grafana Node Panel.

Well, right now I have graphviz dot which should be enough to load in and transform as needed into whatever DSL desired.

I don't think anything that I'm aware of converts graphviz dot files into Grafana Node Panels but it would be a good project if someone did it.

I figure there's bound to be a parser in Python that can load my graphviz files and from there it's easy enough to transform objects in memory as required.

I work with someone who is blind, and our diagrams are written in something similar to this (can't remember the name, but confluence either supports it out of the box or there's a plugin for it).

And personally, if you're going to suggest an alternative, Miro is not the one. Irritating SAAS nonsense

To each their own I guess, some people like doing it this way, so good for them. I personally wouldn't use this either, as I find GUI tools faster and easier to use.

I use mermaidjs for basically everything documentation related. It works in GitHub ... confluence ... everywhere. This looks like a much prettier version of that.

Yeah, for me this is why nothing else can compete. If there's native support in GitHub it's hard to see anything else as better without that feature.

To me, that’s also a problem. It locks out competitors (like this tool). It’d be great if they simply allowed installing arbitrary renderers on an org (basically, given a fenced input, output an image or formatted text).

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