Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisRR | Hacker News Reader

I've never found one of these that works for more than simple diagrams. No matter which I've tried, once the diagram has more than a few nodes the layout goes wacky and you have to write so much additional code to hack it back into a sane layout.

Then your code is a mess and the results are fragile.

I'd love to find a diagram as code software that works well, but unfortunately PlantUML, Mermaid, D2 have all had the same issues

View on HN

I believe that the problem here is that there isn't an agreed-upon answer to a fundamental question:

>What does an algorithm look like?

The problem is expressiveness of such a diagram is bounded by the size of a screen or a sheet of paper, and once one starts to scroll, or can't see the entire flow at a glance, things get complicated.

The node/wire programming folks have this a bit rougher to the point that there are sites such as:

https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/

https://scriptsofanotherdimension.tumblr.com/

I prefer to work visually, but not sure if that's actually valid --- unfortunately https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ doesn't support all of OpenSCAD and https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor has problems with a stylus (I have to leave the Windows Settings app open to toggle stylus behaviour which is enough friction that I don't use it as much as I would otherwise).

There are promising tools though: https://nodezator.com/ and https://ryven.org/ are very cool.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com