Depict Alternatives

depict reviews and mentions

• A CSS-Inspired Syntax for Flowcharts
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Aug 2022

  One potential solution direction, which you can try out via my own incomplete drawing toy [1] is to treat punctuation characters like SP (“ “), COMMA (“,”), and SEMICOLON (“;”) as markers for the product operations of a family of monoids that allow you to specify more and more complicated sequences without requiring the typist to “move the cursor left” to add a matching character.

  This way, simple lists can be specified via juxtaposition:

  a b c

  And then more complex lists

  thing 1, thing 2, thing 3

  and still more complex lists like

  A complex thing; with data, and more data

  can be specified in a way that is potentially still human-legible and easily editable.

  Combined with ~instant feedback while typing and, ideally, a “brushing” system to allow selection of parts of the textual model via the linked drawing, I am hopeful that this can be solved resiliently, at least for the most common use cases.

  (Part of why I am excited about OP’s work here though is that while I have done a fair bit in my own project on drawing a related kind of diagrams, I have myself only begun thinking about how to make the resulting drawings nicely stylable/themeable.)

  [1] https://mstone.info/depict/ -> https://github.com/mstone/depict

• Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?
  20 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 May 2022

  You might find it helpful to distinguish between visualizing the design of the system being implemented by your software, visualizing protocols being implemented by your software, visualizing the design of the your software itself, and visualizing important implementation details at runtime, e.g. for debugging, profiling, and operations.

  For visualizing system designs, you should take a look at STAMP, e.g., via “Engineering A Safer World” + the resources at mit.edu/psas + on YouTube.

  (Multiple tools, both commercial and libre, exist and are being developed to make these diagrams, although for what it’s worth, I mostly hear about people making them using draw.io, Google Drawings, on physical paper/whiteboards, or occasionally with specialized tooling.

  I have also recently published a project in this area, https://github.com/mstone/depict, which I believe is well on its way toward addressing some unmet needs here.)

  For visualizing protocols, things like sequence diagrams, data flow diagrams, DRAKON flow charts, value stream maps, and occasional more specialized objects like CPSA “cryptographic protocol shapes” / strand space skeletons are where I start depending on the flavor of what’s needed.

  For visualizing the design of implementations themselves, I have not yet seen anything that I feel obliged to recommend; rather, here, I suggest investing in adding illustrations to your existing documentation in whatever way is easiest for you to use to clarify whatever subtleties you need to clarify for your audience.

  (Here I tend to look at things like ASCII-art, SQLite’s railroad diagrams (now made with pikchr, AIUI), and sequence diagrams, as mentioned by other commenters, as helpful examples to start with.)

  Finally, for implementing debugging/profiling/operational illustrations, there is a such a rich set of examples to turn to — whether from the very specialized (custom process model video rendering pipelines in robotics) to TensorBoard for TensorFlow to general-purpose tools like browser performance debugging suites, flame charts, or Go’s built-in profile graphing tools - that rather than learn any particular such tools, I’d instead suggest trying to get comfortable with the building blocks underlying these systems, which include contemporary GUI/web apps, custom drawing and animation tools like SVG, pretty printers, and Grammar-of-Graphics systems like vega-lite.

  (Note: although it may seem superficially extraneous to your question, the reason I also suggest thinking about debugging visualizations in this context is because IMO, to work, they ~necessarily encode a visual model of the design of your implementation since it is the design of the implementation that provides the vocabulary and relationships that have to be understood and navigated in order to successfully debug/optimize/monitor any given running instance of whatever system you are building.)