"Ultimately I found that visualizing large graphs is rarely helpful in practice; they can certainly look nice for some well defined graphs, but I rarely saw well defined graphs in the wild."
Since writing that I'm finding my frustration at the inability of diagrams to link out or be linked into is growing. In hindsight it seems a super obvious way of using diagrams in a useful manner and nothing supports it worth a crap, even things that really ought to like Mermaid (which permits out links in text but holds it at arm's length (requiring you to set the diagram to "unsafe"[1]) and as near I can tell in a quick search never mentions this as a thing you can do in its docs, and still has no particular support I can find for linking in to a graph). This has turned into a "can't unsee" for me.
(Obviously I have not used every diagramming solution ever, so maybe there is something out there that supports linking in and/or out, and I'd love to hear about it... however, bear in mind I'm looking for what you might call "first class" support, that is, a feature clearly considered important in the design phase of the project, not the sort of accidental-combination-of-features accidental support that Mermaid half has, if you flip some obscure settings to "lower security" somewhere.)
> There are three basic types of “boxes and lines” (as I derisively refer to them) diagrams:
the point of a boxes-and-lines diagram is to express relationships between components at a single layer/level of abstraction
the best metric for the "quality" of a diagram isn't the number of boxes, rather it's the number of edge-crossings, where >0 is a pretty reliable signal that either (a) the diagram is trying to show too much, or (b) the architecture is sub-optimal
any non-trivial system will always require multiple boxes-and-lines diagrams to be accurately described, one per abstraction-layer
and not really sure that linking between diagram and code is a core requirement, diagrams will generally include identifiers that are unambiguously grep-able, i guess...
Yes, I'm with you: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2025/on_layers_and_boxes_and_lines...
Since writing that I'm finding my frustration at the inability of diagrams to link out or be linked into is growing. In hindsight it seems a super obvious way of using diagrams in a useful manner and nothing supports it worth a crap, even things that really ought to like Mermaid (which permits out links in text but holds it at arm's length (requiring you to set the diagram to "unsafe"[1]) and as near I can tell in a quick search never mentions this as a thing you can do in its docs, and still has no particular support I can find for linking in to a graph). This has turned into a "can't unsee" for me.
(Obviously I have not used every diagramming solution ever, so maybe there is something out there that supports linking in and/or out, and I'd love to hear about it... however, bear in mind I'm looking for what you might call "first class" support, that is, a feature clearly considered important in the design phase of the project, not the sort of accidental-combination-of-features accidental support that Mermaid half has, if you flip some obscure settings to "lower security" somewhere.)
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41960529/how-to-add-a-li...