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Comment by jordanb | Hacker News Reader

Given how much money IBM still makes off of Rational, clearly somebody's writing UML. I imagine that all that UML's being written at places like banks, defense contractors, three letter agencies...

If there really are people at an internet company like Yahoo doing that, well, wow. I don't see how a company where such a thing even was allowed to develop could have a future in this industry.

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Having worked with some of the first few Rational employees, my understanding is that Rational was/is very good at sales through their consulting arms (hired a consultant? congrats, you just paid a member of their sales force to wear your employee badge!). They don't have particularly great usage numbers on those sold products, though.

That said, there are some very useful UML diagrams for non-architect-titled folks. For people stuck using class-heavy systems (some of which are out of their control), the UML Sequence Diagram is both useful and a very compact way to explain "what happens when the user goes <poke>": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_diagram

Sequence diagrams existed before UML and for getting stuff done, and being able to maintain it, I prefer http://www.websequencediagrams.com/

I just paste the diagram description into my documents as "hidden text", and everyones happy.

or use mscgen (http://www.mcternan.me.uk/mscgen/)

I find it impossible to imagine anybody who can write a perfectly working software in a UML diagram without writing & testing a line of code

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