What does HackerNews think of Moose?

I use TLA+. Almost every system has some sort of safety property that needs to be guaranteed (bad things must never happen). A good many have liveness properties (something must eventually happen). Diagrams are well and good for documentation but tell you nothing about the specifications of the system.

I tried UML once but found it lacking.

When I’m writing documentation I like to use diagrams. Mermaid has served me well. It’s integrated into GitHub these days which is convenient. I’ve also used ditaa and graphviz to good effect. With org-mode and org-babel it’s quite easy to build executable documentation: take the query from a database to build a rough ER diagram with graphviz, a shell command on a jump box to get the data-plane hosts to build into a network diagram, etc.

Another interesting tool: https://github.com/moosetechnology/Moose I haven’t spent that much time with it but I learned enough to generate a dependency graph for a NodeJS project that was useful for planning refactoring work.

Update: Alloy is another nice modelling system. It has a built in visualization system as well. And the newest release, Alloy 6, has features to make liveness checking a whole lot easier and more powerful. The book, Software Abstractions, is also indispensable for general program design advice.

I recently started looking into what's new with Pharo Smalltalk and associated projects since last I had a look... There are many that are underrated, like the new(ish) cog virtual machine:

https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm

Cuis Smalltalk:

https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev

SquakJS: https://github.com/bertfreudenberg/SqueakJS

and it's inspiration, lively:

https://github.com/LivelyKernel/LivelyKernel

A vr community tool/framework for the web in the spirit of open croquet / openqwaq:

https://github.com/virtual-world-framework/vwf

And last, but not least:

https://github.com/moosetechnology/Moose

"Moose is an extensive platform for software and data analysis.

Moose is an open source software. It was started at the Software Composition Group from University of Bern in 1996, and is currently contributed to and used by multiple partners. It offers multiple services ranging from importing and parsing data, to modeling, to measuring, querying, mining, and to building interactive and visual analysis tools."