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by ttfkam 1064 days ago
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

4 comments

Agreed. I'd also add deployment diagrams[0] to the "pretty darn useful" list.

0 - https://www.uml-diagrams.org/deployment-diagrams.html

I've gotten some mileage out of the PlantUML JSON visualization, as well as the REGEX graph, gantt, salt, and wbs for org charts.

XEARTH is also pretty neat, if you don't want to bring in a full mapping API just to show a point on a map. I realize it's a pretty crappy map in XEARTH, but the point is, I don't always need a good map.

Mermaid's nice though. I love the git graph - I use that thing every day. If I'm not dealing with ITAR data I just render everything remote through the kroki service, and take what I need from each graph spec.

Yes, there are many useful diagrams in UML, but a lot of them (e.g. entity diagrams) don't map well to text based formats such as MermaidJS, because the positioning is quite important and MermaidJS often won't guess correctly.

Meanwhile, sequence diagrams map very well from the text description.

I'll give those another look, thanks!