As an aside, I've been pretty impressed at GPT4's ability at generating MermaidJS sequence diagrams for open source projects.

The article claims that sequence charts are the only useful thing in UML. What about:

Entity diagrams, especially for database ERD

Timing diagrams (think: Gantt)

Interaction/flow diagrams

Use case diagrams

I guess it’s effective because it is similar to Markdown and other lightweight stuff: things like bullet items are just written like bullet items, with hyphens (or similar). You write it how you want it to be displayed. Granted for a diagram it’s more complicated since it’s a graph and not a tree, and you write it with declarative arrows rather than as ASCII art, but perhaps that in practice strikes a nice balance between being non-finicky and at the same being simple enough (syntax-wise) in order to deal with.

That aside the “unreasonable effectiveness” allusion to “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” is clearly overwrought. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

> Reaching for code to solve my code problem seemed like something that would only appeal to someone that loves code so much that they're probably no good at visualizing.

It looks more like a pseudo-markup to me.

I have used Mermaid diagrams quite a bit lately because ChatGPT can generate them. It's been an easy way to get it to visualize things before I have access to the image generation stuff. It works really well, try it if you haven't!

I only wish the renderer could render "sketch" style like Excalidraw, I don't like the default appearance. Obviously a small detail, though.

I really, _really_ wish I could generate SVGs of these without JavaScript and a headless browser.

I can highly recommend PlantUML as a simple language for creating sequence diagrams. It also supports other UML diagram types, which, despite what the article says, are also useful sometimes (so long as you don't worry about every last silly detail that's specified in the standard).

   @startuml
   Alice -> Bob: Authentication Request
   Bob --> Alice: Authentication Response

   Alice -> Bob: Another authentication Request
   Alice <-- Bob: Another authentication Response
   @enduml

https://plantuml.com/sequence-diagram

This is a much better link than the GH repo - it contains examples and the docs. https://motioncanvas.io/

Imagine you have a friend. A good friend.

One day, when you're not paying attention, your friend says to you, in a tonguetwister, "ifyoudontmindmelookingthroughyouraddressbookandcallingeveryonesaywhat?"

"What?" you reply.

"Nothing.", says friend.

Later that day, when you're not looking, your friend copies all the numbers out of your address book and starts calling everyone. If they pick up the phone, friend says:

"Good afternoon, Friend's Name, Your Name said you'd be interested in my new social network, would you like to sign up?"

If you found out that this had happened, would you still be friends with this person? Would you still talk to them? Would you still want to know what they have to say?