I feel like C4 tries to be a common language for back-of-the-envelope sketches, which is a laudable goal. UML tried to be a formal standard for back-of-the-envelope sketching, which was lunacy. But if we can all agree on basically what we're drawing, that'd help, surely.
But C4 seems almost too lightweight to merit a name. Its drawing toolbox is just boxes, arrows, stick figures and datastore, with 'boxes' meaning one of four different things depending on the diagram level (Context, container, component, code). But the boxes are the easy part! The only thing I want a diagramming standard to settle on is 'what do the arrows mean, and which direction do they go in', and C4 fails on that front - the arrows mean 'whatever you label them to mean' - they are literally just 'relationships', so on one C4 diagram you might have one arrow that means 'writes data to' and another one that means 'is written to by', and that's fine.
The C4 docs say little of relationships, apart from, 'Try to be as specific as possible with the label, ideally avoiding single words like, "Uses".'
The C4 examples contain lots of relationships labelled as 'Uses'.
So I'm sorry, but I just don't see the value C4 brings to the table. Do I need to pay for the training?
> But C4 seems almost too lightweight to merit a name.
Fun fact ... it actually didn't have a name for the first few years, and was just the approach I used and taught people on my software architecture workshops.
But C4 seems almost too lightweight to merit a name. Its drawing toolbox is just boxes, arrows, stick figures and datastore, with 'boxes' meaning one of four different things depending on the diagram level (Context, container, component, code). But the boxes are the easy part! The only thing I want a diagramming standard to settle on is 'what do the arrows mean, and which direction do they go in', and C4 fails on that front - the arrows mean 'whatever you label them to mean' - they are literally just 'relationships', so on one C4 diagram you might have one arrow that means 'writes data to' and another one that means 'is written to by', and that's fine.
The C4 docs say little of relationships, apart from, 'Try to be as specific as possible with the label, ideally avoiding single words like, "Uses".'
The C4 examples contain lots of relationships labelled as 'Uses'.
So I'm sorry, but I just don't see the value C4 brings to the table. Do I need to pay for the training?