Ivar 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. 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.”
