The UML / DSL debate

There's been some debate between some of my MSFT colleagues (Alan Wills, Steve Cook, Jack Greenfield) and Grady Booch and others over at IBM around UML and DSLs. For those interested, Grady actually posted an article on UML and DSLs back in May last year - seems to have gone unnoticed. It touched on some of the themes that have been under discussion. My first blog entry was a response to this article.

A particular theme that crops up in the discussion is the issue of tools versus language. Grady seems to want to keep the two separate, whereas we believe that the two are closely linked - a language designed to be used in a tool is going to be different to a language designed to be used on paper.

I touched on this line of discussion in an article a few months back: https://blogs.msdn.com/stuart_kent/articles/181565.aspx

An example I used was that of class diagrams, and I pointed out a couple of aspects of class diagrams which may have been designed differently had the original intention been to use them within a tool rather than on paper. Now I can point you at an example notation that addresses some of these issues. It is the notation we use for defining domain models in our DSL Tools. Here's a sample:

Domain model for UIP Chart Language

Nodes are classes, lines are relationships or inheritance arrows. Nodes are organized into relationship and inheritance trees, which can be expanded or collapsed, making it easy to navigate and drill into large models (not something you do on paper).

A relationship line has the role information (would be association end information in UML 2) annotated in the middle of the line rather than at the ends: a role is represented as a triangle or rectangle containing a multiplicity, and the name of a role is annotated using a label (in the diagram above reverse role names have been hidden as they are usually less interesting).

Annotating role information in the middle of the line not only makes it easier to automatically place labels, it also means that relationship lines can be chanelled together enabling an expandable relationship tree to be automatically constructed and layed out. An example of channelling is given by the diagram below, where you can see all the relationship lines sourced on Page channelled together so that they connect to Page at the same point:

Domain model for UIP Chart Language

The point here is that this notation was designed from the start using criteria such as 'must support autolayout' and 'must support easy navigation of large models'. If the criteria were 'must be easily cut up into page size chunks', must be easy to sketch on a whiteboard' then the notation may well have turned out different.