AGagentultra·Jan 12, 2023
I use TLA+. Almost every system has some sort of safety property that needs to be guaranteed (bad things must never happen). A good many have liveness properties (something must eventually happen). Diagrams are well and good for documentation but tell you nothing about the specifications of the system.
I tried UML once but found it lacking.
When I’m writing documentation I like to use diagrams. Mermaid has served me well. It’s integrated into GitHub these days which is convenient. I’ve also used ditaa and graphviz to good effect. With org-mode and org-babel it’s quite easy to build executable documentation: take the query from a database to build a rough ER diagram with graphviz, a shell command on a jump box to get the data-plane hosts to build into a network diagram, etc.
Another interesting tool: https://github.com/moosetechnology/Moo
Read the rest
se I haven’t spent that much time with it but I learned enough to generate a dependency graph for a NodeJS project that was useful for planning refactoring work.
Update: Alloy is another nice modelling system. It has a built in visualization system as well. And the newest release, Alloy 6, has features to make liveness checking a whole lot easier and more powerful. The book, Software Abstractions, is also indispensable for general program design advice.