Something I never really put together until seeing it written up in the recent threads on HN about UML is the way in which it was largely a dead evolutionary en

Something I never really put together until seeing it written up in the recent threads on HN about UML is the way in which it was largely a dead evolutionary end for software and that other approaches (e.g. agile) took a different evolutionary fork and appear to have won out for now. Thinking on it now the comparison is more than the obvious "waterfall sux" reduction, but entire ecosystems of support tooling, with millions of man-hours, billions of dollars, and entire forests of printed material was built on a faulty metaphor. UML reeks of bad academic thought. What I mean is that strange sort of thinking that seems to infiltrate certain upper strata academic circles where some obscure thinkery is apparently "all of the work" and the detailed work of actually building the thing is just hand-waved away as "something the research assistants will grind out and I won't be troubled with". It's where folks who build an overly complicated wall-sized "design" diagram declare that the project is done, even if literally tens of thousands of hours remain to get to lights on. More constructively, it turns out UML does have its place in some niche areas for design, and it's a good skillset to have to document certain complex systems for turnover and as inspiration for communication-via-picture, but it's not fundamentally a good toolset in its original incarnation that comes from a valid set of assumptions. I found when learning it in college software engineering courses that there was also a subtext that came through which I believe drove the sudden adoption in enterprise. The long-standing desire to turn software development into a consultancy and drive development into commodity. Remember, UML's heyday coincided neatly with the drive to offshore complex software projects to warehouses full of cheap barely skilled development labor. Billions upon billions of failed, intricately designed, software projects now pave the paths of the agile botanical garden reserve.