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Actively harmful? Diagrams? Sorry I have to counter-react strongly. Your post is negative without a valid point and the irony is that you agree with the post.

Actively harmful? Diagrams? Sorry I have to counter-react strongly. Your post is negative without a valid point and the irony is that you agree with the post. > One can learn much more from walking through the actual source code of some classic projects and from trying to understand what makes them tick That is the fun part about this post! You propose to mandidate a list of classical code bases. This course lets students freely pick any Github project with activity and complexity. They get graded based on pull requests.. Contributing code and interacting with an Open Source project you picked a week ago is not "drawing pictures" and "connecting them with arrows".

stiff 13y ago
Programs are powerful because of concepts. Whether or not you will be able to build a good 3d engine rests much more on the fact whether you know or able to invent a concept of a vector and have it guide all your future coding than it rests on whatever is visible from a block diagram. Both the course and the book linked to seem to focus on some abstract ideas of doubtful usefulness and never ever seem to touch upon those important things that historically have allowed us to build complex programs where other approaches have failed. Google can exist not because people invented new kinds of diagrams, but because large scale numerical linear algebra techniques were applied to the problem of search. This is the heart of Google's "architecture", not a class diagram of the crawler. Picking arbitrary programs won't do. The point is to pick the really good designs and illustrate why they are good, and I think it boils down much more to knowing mathematics, algorithms, programming languages and having studied a lot of existing software, than to usage of any modelling techniques so far invented in formal software engineering circles.
- broseph 13y ago
  There's no conflict between reading and understanding a codebase and seeing the value in a diagram. You can have both. Take a look at the example you chose: [0] and [1] (about a third of the way down). They first explained PageRank (without a diagram), then explained the flow of the data from the crawler (with a diagram). You seem to be arguing that diagrams are never useful, and that just isn't true. [0] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html [1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/over.gif http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/over.gif

stiff 13y ago

Programs are powerful because of concepts. Whether or not you will be able to build a good 3d engine rests much more on the fact whether you know or able to invent a concept of a vector and have it guide all your future coding than it rests on whatever is visible from a block diagram. Both the course and the book linked to seem to focus on some abstract ideas of doubtful usefulness and never ever seem to touch upon those important things that historically have allowed us to build complex programs where other approaches have failed. Google can exist not because people invented new kinds of diagrams, but because large scale numerical linear algebra techniques were applied to the problem of search. This is the heart of Google's "architecture", not a class diagram of the crawler. Picking arbitrary programs won't do. The point is to pick the really good designs and illustrate why they are good, and I think it boils down much more to knowing mathematics, algorithms, programming languages and having studied a lot of existing software, than to usage of any modelling techniques so far invented in formal software engineering circles.

broseph 13y ago
There's no conflict between reading and understanding a codebase and seeing the value in a diagram. You can have both. Take a look at the example you chose: [0] and [1] (about a third of the way down). They first explained PageRank (without a diagram), then explained the flow of the data from the crawler (with a diagram). You seem to be arguing that diagrams are never useful, and that just isn't true. [0] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html [1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/over.gif http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/over.gif