Comments on: English for Software Engineers (with UML)

By: Dmitry Vostokov

Dmitry Vostokov — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 06:43:47 +0000

It finally worked Thank you!

By: Yanic

Yanic — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 00:09:16 +0000

I’ve been trying to contact you, don’t know if that worked though. Let me know if it didn’t.

By: Dmitry Vostokov

Dmitry Vostokov — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 07:18:56 +0000

Tim, I completely agree, if you don’t mind, I put a Russian translation of your comment on my Russian blog! Thanks, Dmitry

By: tim

tim — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:03:18 +0000

Interesting idea, but I don’t think those diagrams truly explain the difference between the two tenses. It’s something I’ve thought about quite a lot as my wife is French and sometimes has trouble with this.

The problem is that after doing something else, one might sometimes say “I sent the fix” and sometimes say “I have sent the fix.” It depends on the context. Let me give two examples.

Example 1.

X: You keep on saying that you’re going to send the fix, but you never do.

Y: Yes, I’m very sorry about that, but I’ve been extremely busy recently.

Y works on the fix, sends it, and then does something else. Much later:

Y: You’ll never believe this, but I’ve sent the fix.

X: At last!

Example 2.

X: Do you want to go for a drink at 8.00 with me and a few friends?

Y: I’d love to but I’ve set that time aside for sending the fix.

Y works on the fix and sends it. The next day:

Y: Did you have a good evening yesterday?

X: Yes we did. Pity you couldn’t be there. How did you get on?

Y: Well, I sent the fix.

The difference between these two conversations is that in the second one Y is referring to a specific time, and is therefore telling a story about the past, so to speak. In the first conversation, Y is referring to his/her present state, the state of having sent the fix. One way to describe the difference is that to say, “I have done ***,” is to say, “The action of my doing *** is complete,” whereas to say, “I did ***,” is to say, “At a specified (or implied, or understood) time the action of my doing *** occurred.”

By: Yanic

Yanic — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:19:43 +0000

Sure, no problem. Looking forward to it!

By: Dmitry Vostokov

Dmitry Vostokov — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:05:44 +0000

Not yet, as I was busy with other projects, but give it a try when I resume my English language related posts soon! Thanks for reminding me, anyway it is still on my list. By the way, if I use your trial version to draw diagrams, can I later include them in my books?

By: Yanic

Yanic — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:06:42 +0000

Hi Dmitry,

I’m curious, were you able to produce anything useful in your experiments with Trace Modeler? Let me know!

Best regards,
Yanic

By: Dmitry Vostokov

Dmitry Vostokov — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:38:22 +0000

This is cool! I’ll try with stack traces together with IPC and other stuff and let you know.

Thanks,
Dmitry

By: Yanic

Yanic — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:00:26 +0000

Hmm, let’s try that again with a ‘pre’ tag :

# targets
OBJECT target0 “Controller”
OBJECT target1 “Model”
OBJECT target2 “View”

# trace
CALL target0 “handleEvent”
CALL target1 “service”
CALL target1 “notify”
CALL target2 “update”
CALL target2 “display”
CALL target1 “getData”
RETURN “”
RETURN “”
RETURN “”
CALL target0 “update”
CALL target1 “getData”
RETURN “”
RETURN “”
RETURN “”
RETURN “”
RETURN “”

By: Yanic

Yanic — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:58:36 +0000

The reason I’m asking is that Trace Modeler has a really simple (text-based) file format, so it would be rather trivial to write a sequence diagram generator.

For example, the text
# targets OBJECT target0 "Controller" OBJECT target1 "Model" OBJECT target2 "View" # trace CALL target0 "handleEvent" CALL target1 "service" CALL target1 "notify" CALL target2 "update" CALL target2 "display" CALL target1 "getData" RETURN "" RETURN "" RETURN "" CALL target0 "update" CALL target1 "getData" RETURN "" RETURN "" RETURN "" RETURN "" RETURN ""

Produces this UML sequence diagram. So you see it is pretty straightforward to generate diagrams if you have the necessary information you want to depict.

As I said, I’m not that familiar with what you’re doing so I can’t write the generator myself, but I’m always interested in new contexts for Trace Modeler. So if that is something you wish to try out, let me know and I’ll see what I can do to help you.