[HotGarbage]

This is why the C4 Model insists on using verbs to label interactions. (e.g. “reads/writes data from”, “sends reports to”, etc).

Most of the article's diagrams are actually terrible in this regard.

[kqr]

This is an older discoery than that. Expert systems back in the day often modeled knowledge as graphs with the arrows being labeled with the specific relationship between the things.

It works because (node, edge, node) triplets then form propositions, the fundamental units of knowledge

Come to think of it, expertise researchers still do this today to make rough sketches of domains of study. The result is called a concept map.

[cenamus]

C4 is great, even if I can't be bothered to model every layer

[StrauXX]

You shouldn't! The official writings explicitly discourage creating third and fourth layer diagrams!

[amelius]

This is what I like about electronic circuit schematics: there is only one way to interpret them.

Unfortunately, the exception is in the "functional block diagram" sections in datasheets, where a more loose format is used.