Maybe it'd be neat.. but, I think sometimes "the map is not the territory" goes both ways. - I probably want a diagram to be simpler than the actual system.
With a manually constructed diagram, I have leverage to handwave irrelevant details away.
Perhaps to compare with documentation: it's easy to automatically describe things like types, and maybe callgraphs, but there's value in having prose which explains details about the interface which the program's type doesn't reveal. - With diagrams to visualise a system, the significance (or incidental nature) of the relationships may be hard to pick automatically.
Comments
Maybe it'd be neat.. but, I think sometimes "the map is not the territory" goes both ways. - I probably want a diagram to be simpler than the actual system.
With a manually constructed diagram, I have leverage to handwave irrelevant details away.
Perhaps to compare with documentation: it's easy to automatically describe things like types, and maybe callgraphs, but there's value in having prose which explains details about the interface which the program's type doesn't reveal. - With diagrams to visualise a system, the significance (or incidental nature) of the relationships may be hard to pick automatically.
Yes exactly. There are no tools that can build proper mental models.
Most of a system is either uninteresting or trivial. You need someone to tell you where the interesting part is.