Ask HN: Good and concise uml resources

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3 points by bligh____ 3113 days ago

Is there any place where one could get a clear explanation of what the specific elements in a uml drawing mean. Uml is not something very hard by its nature, but people make it hard by describing graphical elements with words and explaining trivial concepts with slang from the spec. Is there a cheat sheet or 20 or less pages book explaining uml to programers .

PS. To the uml hater: yes uml is the embodiment of all the stuff you hate about programming, an immense spec mostly composed of slang and terms and everyone interprets the spec differently basically creating a new uml dialect , but if for some reason you need to draw a diagram why reinvent the wheel, and btw you can also automate it - see plantulm

The the Ulm evangelist: no, sorry but a 300 page book is not an adequate way if explaining how to draw a diagram.

1 comments

PaulHoule 3113 days ago

The UML specs are a pain to work with. In theory you can start with emof (not that big) which is self-describing and self-hosting, then add a few features to get to cmof, then you can specify UML itself in cmof.

Trouble is that emof came after UML, and emof is defined on paper as "These features from UML 2 plus a few more"; whereas sane documentation would start out specifying emof, then layer the other specs on top of it.

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