Re: Communications of ACM: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33!

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Thu, 30 Dec 2010 22:05:07 +0000, Simon Wright wrote:

> "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:
> 
>> UML is absolutely unusable for distributed systems, but I don't want
>> to get into it. Suppose I need to invert a 10x10 matrix, and, please,
>> no message boxes, customers get fancy when see that mess.
> 
> It would be very unproductive to model matrix inversion in UML. You'd
> use a library function in your language of choice.
> 
> Unless, of course, the problem you have to solve is to invert a
> 1000000x1000000 matrix over a distributed system, in which case you must
> deal with how to distribute the solution; and designing the necessary
> software modules and communications between them would be of the
> essence. At which point, why would UML be inappropriate?

For the same reason it would be unproductive to model the matrix inversion
process. Presently I have enough trouble with other modeling tools there.
The recent plaque is all sorts of pseudo-languages describing communication
protocol layers. This is a disaster, far worse than any UML. Nobody can
decipher this mess in order to determine what should actually be put on the
wire.

> It [can be used
> as] a language for discussing problems at an abstract level, so you can
> see the wood for the trees.

Yes, however people forget the meaning of the bubbles at the arrows' ends.
Code snippets are more dense and better convey the idea of the pattern
being discussed.

> There's an excellent article at
> http://knol.google.com/k/how-to-build-articulate-uml-class-models by my
> hero Leon Starr.

"Object oriented methods" by James Martin and James Odell is not bad. I
periodically blow the dust off it, when yet another customer comes with an
idea of requiring UML. Fortunately, this happens less frequently, as years
go by...

Happy New Year,

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de