[erlang-questions] Visual Erlang notation v0.1.0 - feedback request

[Erik Søe Sørensen]

It looks good - and appears to incorporate appropriate Erlang idioms.
I will try it out at the next whiteboard design discussion :-)

There is one thing that bugs me, though: The representation of links as a
dual monitor (or, equivalently, of monitors as one-way links).
The notation has the nice property that to see which other processes are
affected when a given process dies, you simply look for circles around that
process. That's good.
But there are several differences between monitors and links:
- the relation is asymmetric;
- link behaviour is affected by trap_exit, monitor behaviour isn't;
- links propagate exits, monitors don't;
- reason 'normal' is special to links (when not trap_exit'ed).
(And of course, the message format is different.)

All in all, I believe we might be better off with a slightly different
notation for monitors - say, a single-line-with-circle.

Am I making sufficient sense?

/Erik
 Den 02/05/2014 09.22 skrev "Torben Hoffmann" <
torben.hoffmann@REDACTED>:

> Hi,
>
> As I have mentioned before I have been working on a visual notation for
> Erlang and
> although it is not complete yet I have received requests to release it
> anyway, so
> here goes...
>
> https://github.com/esl/visual_erlang
>
> One extra thing missing from the to-do list is state data for processes.
>
> I would like some feedback on how you feel the abstraction level is.
> The purpose of Visual Erlang is not to be able to specify every little
> detail of what
> happens in an Erlang program, but to give a way to describe the
> architecture.
>
> Once I have updated the Erlang Concurrency Patterns that Jesper and I have
> been
> working on to the new Visual Erlang notation we will release them as well.
>
> The original plan for the patterns was to use Object-Process Methodology
> as the
> notation, but I was adviced (and thanks for that) to invent an Erlang
> specific
> notation since OPM has some corners that hurts for Erlang.
>
> Right now the only way to draw Visual Erlang diagrams is by hand or use
> the LaTeX
> macros I have created, but since Visual Erlang has a 1:1 mapping between
> the visuals
> and a textual notation my hope is that we can create a tool that can
> create a diagram
> from the textual notation.
>
> Going even further I dream of having a tool that extracts the Visual
> Erlang notation
> from the code in an interactive manner, where the user can guide what to
> abstract and
> what to just leave totally out.
>
> Cheers,
> Torben
> --
> Torben Hoffmann
> CTO
> Erlang Solutions Ltd.
> Tel: +45 25 14 05 38
> http://www.erlang-solutions.com
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