[TylerJewell]

The Ballerina programming language (ballerina.io) has a syntax designed in such a way that any syntactically correct program can have its sequence diagram generated automatically. It's a type of self-documenting programming language. It only documents for the scope of the service that is being programmed, but eventually if many components and services are programmed with Ballerina, system wide architecture diagrams can also be constructed.

[mattdeboard]

This is interesting. I ctrl-f'd for "self-doc" because I was wondering when we will start seeing Terraform, Puppet, etc., have options to generate a diagram automatically as part of their normal operation. Self-documenting infrastructure would be a godsend. My organization is challenged by the lack of documentation of our infrastructure, especially.

edit: Most of the responses to the original post seem to be addressing the idea of understanding code through diagramming. I am _much_ more interested in understanding complex infrastructure through diagrams. What queues do we have, what are the producers, what are the consumers? Where is the database? What writes to it? What do we shard on?

Code's a lot slipperier to autodoc, and the slipperiness is a function of number of contributors.

Infrastructure, however, we have been herding (pun intended) to a more declarative, predictable paradigm for years which is great. So let's start building the auto-documentation stuff into e.g. Terraform, since infrastructure-as-code seems like the natural place for such useful side effects of provisioning assets.

[sien]

It's already there with Terraform but it's not that pretty yet:

https://www.terraform.io/docs/commands/graph.html

[qznc]

More evidence that graphviz needs a successor or makeover. Some force-based post-processing with the additional goal of rectangular borders would be good. Also some tweaks like little arcs where lines cross and shadows for boxes.

[quickthrower2]

I wonder if this needs its own language. It looks like c# from a quick glance. I wonder if static analysis on an existing language would be just as good. In any case I love this idea.