On Visual Formalisms (1988) by David Harel

[rekreanto]

On Visual Formalisms (1988)
In this paper, David Harel gives the diagrammatic principle of Statecharts a name, "Higraphs", analyzes their strong sides from a language design perspective and shows how they can be used not only for Statecharts but in many domains, such as ER-diagrams etc. This fact was an eye-opener to me.

I especially noted that Harel's main point related to language design is that Higraphs are able to express relations that are part of the notation itself in a visually distinct way, while other notations often must resort to expressing notation-semantics using the same means of expression as the modeled domain.