"Ultimately I found that visualizing large graphs is rarely helpful in practice; they can certainly look nice for some well defined graphs, but I rarely saw well defined graphs in the wild."
Yes, I'm with you: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2025/on_layers_and_boxes_and_lines...
Since writing that I'm finding my frustration at the inability of diagrams to link out or be linked into is growing. In hindsight it seems a super obvious way of using diagrams in a useful manner and nothing supports it worth a crap, even things that really ought to like Mermaid (which permits out links in text but holds it at arm's length (requiring you to set the diagram to "unsafe"[1]) and as near I can tell in a quick search never mentions this as a thing you can do in its docs, and still has no particular support I can find for linking in to a graph). This has turned into a "can't unsee" for me.
(Obviously I have not used every diagramming solution ever, so maybe there is something out there that supports linking in and/or out, and I'd love to hear about it... however, bear in mind I'm looking for what you might call "first class" support, that is, a feature clearly considered important in the design phase of the project, not the sort of accidental-combination-of-features accidental support that Mermaid half has, if you flip some obscure settings to "lower security" somewhere.)
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41960529/how-to-add-a-li...
> There are three basic types of “boxes and lines” (as I derisively refer to them) diagrams:
the point of a boxes-and-lines diagram is to express relationships between components at a single layer/level of abstraction
the best metric for the "quality" of a diagram isn't the number of boxes, rather it's the number of edge-crossings, where >0 is a pretty reliable signal that either (a) the diagram is trying to show too much, or (b) the architecture is sub-optimal
any non-trivial system will always require multiple boxes-and-lines diagrams to be accurately described, one per abstraction-layer
and not really sure that linking between diagram and code is a core requirement, diagrams will generally include identifiers that are unambiguously grep-able, i guess...
Enterprise architect ($$) had that buried in the gui, and wondered for long if obsidian canvas could do the same, reports wanted.