interactive help on the base object

[Roy Smith]

In article <52a6af26$0$2829$c3e8da3$76491128 at news.astraweb.com>,
 Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
 
> > What about whether the arrows should have solid heads, open heads,
> > barbed heads, double-barbed heads, or circles (filled or open)?  Surely
> > you can't expect people to write decent programs when they can't even
> > draw the right kind of arrowhead?
> 
> You mock, and so you should, but I just thought I'd mention that there 
> are standards for this sort of thing:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language
> 
> According to UML the type of arrow head does make a difference.

Surely you realize that such a carefully constructed mock could not have 
been generated without knowledge of the mockee?  UML, like so many 
things, started out with a few good ideas.  Giving some structure to how 
you sketch out classes on a whiteboard was a good idea.  Sequence 
diagrams, in particular, are a neat way to understand complicated 
control flows.

I've even used UML tools to make sense of some huge pile of C++ code 
that was tossed my way.  Import the code, then start shoving boxes 
around on the screen until some sort of logical structure emerges.

But, once things got to there being N different types of arrowheads, 
each having some magical significance, they lost me.

PS: other things that fall into the "Some good basic ideas, but got 
totally out of hand" include Agile, Six Sigma, and Perl.