Python and UML

[Rob Hall]

> '''
> QOTD, about UML
>
> There are useful diagrams in UML, (eg, the state and transition
> diagrams).  Unfortunately, the one most tools use to generate code
> (and draw from reverse engineering) has everything to do with
> language structure, and nothing to do with what actually happens
> at runtime. To put it bluntly: people spend most of their time
> designing the wrong thing. Worse, they get it wrong, but it's
> carved in stone now; so the final system is either needlessly
> complex and marginally functional, or bears no resemblance to the
> "design".
>         -- Gordon McMillan, 15 Dec 1999
> '''

I aggree entirely with that.  I don't see UML as being all that it is
claimed.  True, it does provide a way of clearly setting the bounds of a
project and for getting a good overview of how it all goes together, but I
see it as an unnessecarily complex beast.

I have found that languages like Java and C++ really benefit from UML
design.  But Python is so easy to read and write that the benefits aren't so
great.  In fact, I've found that sometimes UML gets in the way of
programming good structured Python code.

Rob