From: Frederick H. Cheeseman
Subject: Extensible Programming for the 21st Century ... LISP ... macros ... XML ... etc
Date: 
Message-ID: <pan.2004.05.27.15.52.04.46746@minf.vub.ac.be>
See:
http://pyre.third-bit.com/~gvwilson/xmlprog.html
From: Reini Urban
Subject: Re: Extensible Programming for the 21st Century ... LISP ... macros ... XML ... etc
Date: 
Message-ID: <40bcf214@e-post.inode.at>
Frederick H. Cheeseman schrieb:

> See:
> http://pyre.third-bit.com/~gvwilson/xmlprog.html

As always this argument:
"Objections"
"3. You don't need XML to do this."

"Scheme proves by example that everything described in this article 
could have been done twenty years ago, and could be done today without 
XML. However, the fact is that it didn't happen: as attractive as 
parenthesized lists are conceptually, they failed to win programmers' 
hearts and minds.

In contrast, it has only taken HTML and XML a decade to become the most 
popular data format in history. Every large application today can handle 
it; every programming language contains libraries for manipulating it; 
and every young programmer is as familiar with it as the previous 
generation was with streams of strings. S-expressions might have 
deserved to win, but XML has.

And yes, there are better (i.e. more succinct, and hence easier to 
process) ways to represent the semantics of programs than XML, but we 
believe that will turn out in practice to be irrelevant. XML can do the 
job, and is becoming universal; it is therefore difficult to imagine 
that anything else will be so compelling as to displace it."

These are the arguments that will buy XSL alike languages as universal 
macro language? Is this doctor a "wunderkind" at the age of 15?

 > * programs will be stored as XML documents, so that programmers
 > can represent and process data and meta-data uniformly.

It makes me laugh and cry. Thanksfully nobody will buy that nonsense.
-- 
Reini Urban
http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/home/rurban/