[sbensu]

You are right. The diagrams are used as explanations not as the source of the program. But wouldn't it be neat if when you sketch out the state transition in a diagram (how I think about the state transitions), _that diagram_ was the source of truth for the program?

That is the implied point: let's go to places where we already draw diagrams and check if we can elevate them into the program

[charleslmunger]

This can be really tricky to do. I reached the limit of my brain's working capacity designing a priority inheritance system, and sketched the state machine out in a dot file, visualized with graphviz - this worked really well for reasoning through the correctness of the algorithm and explaining it to others. I tried to structure the implementation code to match it and I was able to get pretty close; but the actual states were a bunch of bit-packing and duplicated control flow to get optimal assembly output for the hottest paths. Each one of those changes was easy to reason about as an isolated correct transformation of the original structure in code, but would have been a mess visually.

[sbensu]

That sounds super interesting!

Did I understand correctly that the additional complexity came because you needed to emit optimal assembly? Or was implementing the logic from the state machine complicated enough?

[w10-1]

Virtually all diagrams are representations of declarations that are the source of truth. Visual editors just help you edit that, but rarely get close to validating the underlying structure.

For things like programming languages and markdown, users switch between the modes. For something like SVG, users rarely learn or solve problems at the declaration level.

The real questions come with declaration re-usability and comparison. Two pdf's can look exactly the same, but be vastly different declarations, which makes comparison and component re-use essentially impossible.

It turns out, much of the benefit of visual editors is built on the underlying declaration model where it supports user edit/inspection goals.

So I think the point is not to have the visual be the source of truth, but to have more visualization and visual editors for the sources we have.

There are/were excellent visual editors for Java and Apple GUI's that supported round-tripping (mode-dependent source of truth). But we seem to have abandoned them not just because they're old, but because of the extra scaffolding required to do the round-tripping.

So my take-away has been that any visualization must be source-first and source-mainly - with no or minimal extra metadata/scaffolding, as markdown is now. That would mean the implied point is that we should visualize (or otherwise abstract to understand) the source we have, instead of using diagrams as the source of truth.

[learn_more]

You might be interested in:

https://schematix.com/video/depmap

I'm the founder. It's a tool for interacting with deployment diagrams like you mentioned in your article.

We have customers who also model state machines and generate code from the diagrams.

[transpute]

> Schematix provides diagrams as a dynamic resource using its API. They aren't images you export, they don't end up in My Documents. This isn't Corel Draw. In Schematix, you specify part of your model using a graph expression, and the system automatically generates a diagram of the objects and relations that match. As your Schematix model changes, the results of the graph expression may change, and thus the visual diagram will also change. But the system doesn't need you to point and click for it. Once you've told it what you want, you're done.

What an interesting tool! It's rare to see robust data models, flexible UX abstractions for dev + ops, lightweight process notations, programmatic inventory, live API dashboards and a multi-browser web client in one product.

Do you have commercial competitors? If not, it might be worth doing a blog post and/or Show HN on OSS tooling (e.g Netbox inventory, netflow analysis of service dependencies) which offer a subset of Schematix, to help potential customers understand what you've accomplished.

Operational risk management consultants in the finance sector could benefit from Schematix, https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/risk-and-resilience/ou.... Lots of complexity and data for neutral visualization tooling.