I needed to make a structural diagram for a research proposal that some colleagues and I are submitting tomorrow. And I ended up creating it by writing a program in Javascript.
This strikes me as somewhat odd, because after all these many years, there are lots of professional programs out there to help you make structural diagrams. Yet with all of that effort by so many smart people, I still find it to be easier to get the diagram I want by writing a computer program.
Part of me wonders whether this will ever change. Will A.I. eventually get to the point where I can just tell it what I want to see, and it will produce the diagram of my dreams?
But there’s another part of me that says that this will never happen. There are just too many little aesthetic tweaks that I want control over, in order to tell exactly the visual story that I want to tell.
And having something that is “sort of” right would just drive me crazy. So I suspect that I will always stick to making diagrams the old fashioned way: Using my trusty vi editor to create a new empty text file, and writing a computer program.