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Jacobson, who helped develop UML, a modelling language used to visualise and blueprint applications, said in an interview with Builder AU that the technology has become less usable as features have been added.
"[UML] needs to be fixed. It needs to be simplified. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just too big. If it's too big people cannot adopt it," Jacobson said.
UML was originally created by Grady Booch, James Rumbaugh and Ivar Jacobson who were collectively known as the "Three Amigos" in the mid-90s. After this time the technology expanded rapidly and started to include support for many industry standards, practices, and players.
Jacobson believes the answer is to create what he is calling Essential UML.
"What we need to do is create Essential UML, which is basically the 20 per cent you need, and the rest you shouldn't even have to touch unless you really want to get into special domains.
"Domain specific languages isn't a new idea ... the problem with this is the same today [as the past] in that if you have no underlying semantics, no core, it's very hard to translate from one language to another. There's a lot of research going on in this area but I have not yet seen something that has yet solved this problem."
"Still, I think languages such as UML has a lot of value but simplification is what's needed," Jacobson said.
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1
Marcob - 11/09/08
"UML was originally created by Grady Booch, James Rumbaugh and Grady Booch".
1) one Booch in excess
2) one Jacobson missing
:-)
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2
brendon.chase - 12/09/08
Sorry about that, we're fixing it up now.
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3
tracy.nelson - 12/09/08
Yeah, I sometimes wonder what I'm missing when I look at UML templates and see all these symbols I don't use (and some I don't even recognize). I find UML indispensible for communicating designs, but I really only use class and sequence diagrams (w/o interaction frames), and occasionally activity diagrams.
One problem that never seems to go away, no matter what notation you use: if you want to show any kind of detail regarding some complex bit of processing, you need an E-size plotter...
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