Drawing Tools
1 Word = 1 Millipicture
— /usr/games/fortune
It’s no accident that in all engineering branches, our colleagues often communicate using drawings and diagrams. Given many artifacts’ scale and complexity, a drawing is often the best way to describe them. Uniquely, in software development we can easily derive pictures from code, and sometimes even code from pictures.
Yet we don’t seem to benefit from drawings in the way other engineers do. Have you ever printed a UML diagram on a large-format plotter? Perhaps part of the problem lies in the fleeting nature of software. Whereas a building’s blueprints can serve its engineers for decades, few of us want to spend valuable time drawing a diagram that will be obsolete in a few years, if not days. We can overcome these problems through tools that automate diagram creation, thus saving us time and helping us keep the diagrams up-to-date.
The text-based tools I describe can’t beat the speed of firing up your drawing editor to jot a few lines or your spreadsheet to create a chart from a list of numbers. However, once you’ve invested in learning them, you’ll be orders-of-magnitude more efficient in diagramming, performing tasks you wouldn’t dream of attempting in the GUI world.
The Lineup
Figure 1a. Drawing by code: diagram made with dot
Perhaps the most impressive tool of the pack is dot. Part of the Graphviz suite, originally developed by AT&T, it lets you describe hierarchical relations between elements using a simple declarative language. For instance, with statements like