[alixanderwang]

This is a problem with the languages, not a fundamental flaw. Well designed GUI can beat poorly designed language, but manipulating text has a much higher ceiling than drag and drop, in terms of speed and comfort/familiarity. Every programmer has their own ecosystem for manipulating text. I can grep, version control, diff, jump with Vim key bindings, search & replace, etc.

The layout engines are very hard. We've been making one [0] for over 2 years now. At first it seemed dubious whether it was possible to beat aesthetics of Graphviz, but we've been designing it to emulate how diagrams might look on a whiteboard drawn by humans. That's a very different heuristic than the theoretical hierarchical cross-minimizations that previous algorithms strive for, and it's yielded good results for a subset of diagrams. With further spot-assist of AI, this will only get better.

[0] not linked to not detract with self-promotion. you can find in my profile if you want

[graphviz]

Thank you for mentioning the aesthetics in graphviz. It's not in any sense optimal; we chose a collection of heuristics meant to get somewhere close to diagrams made by hand (with tools). Some areas can clearly be improved. Even the initial ranking and cycle breaking is not always quite right. Possibly some of the middle stages need to be more aware of groups of nodes. How to draw sets of natural looking curves around obstacles in diagrams still seems to be an open problem, do we even know what to optimize? It's natural to ask if machine learning algorithms will get there first.

[oaiey]

But text has two problems: end users hate it and people cannot see two pages of model/diagram-as-code vs. a visual diagram.

Not everyone is a developer.

[alixanderwang]

That's like saying code has problems because end users hate it -- end users don't see it.

[oaiey]

End users are consumers of the architecture here. Developers, testers, it, manager, customization specialists, customers, auditors,. ..

[alixanderwang]

I think you might've misunderstood. The text generates a visual diagram. Like HTML generates a website. You're not showing customers the text, you show them the diagram. You don't show customers HTML, you show them the site.

[oaiey]

Yeah you are right, i messed up. Indeed it is only the architect who will hate it :)