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In specific cases I find diagrams very good at conveying business logic or for reasoning state machines.
But I don’t like to write them, because I then need to scan them and/or they are quite difficult to read because of my horrendous drawing skills.
Up until today, I have been using wdot.rb, a small ruby script that converts a textual instructions into a graphic diagram, using graphviz behind the scenes.
It has worked beautifully. But it doesn’t render in text. And I would love to have some of those diagrams as comments in my code.
Enter Graph::Easy.
Graph::Easy is more or less the same thing. You type some text with a specific format and you get a diagram as a result. Except it can also render to text.
You can install it via cpan. After installing, it will create a utility script called graph-easy, which in my case was installed under ~/perl5.
I put the following text in a file called /tmp/bleh.txt:
[Unscheduled] --> [Scheduled]
[Scheduled] --> [SendingInProgress]
[Scheduled] --> [Canceled]
[Unscheduled] --> [Canceled]
[SendingInProgress] --> [SendingFinished]
[SendingInProgress] --> [SendingPaused]
[SendingPaused] --> [Canceled]
After executing ~/perl5/bin/graph-easy /tmp/bleh.txt --as boxart --verbose you get the following:
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ∨
┌─────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ ┌───────────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐ ┌──────────┐
│ Unscheduled │ ──> │ Scheduled │ ──> │ SendingInProgress │ ──> │ SendingPaused │ ──> │ Canceled │
└─────────────┘ └──────────────────┘ └───────────────────┘ └───────────────┘ └──────────┘
│ │ ∧
└────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────────┘
│
│
│
∨
┌───────────────────┐
│ SendingFinished │
└───────────────────┘
Beautiful.
EOF