[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
On Wednesday 10 November 2004 23:55, Rick Marshall wrote:
> the trick with xslt is that it's a specification of what to do, not an
> instruction to do something. ie it is truly non-procedural.
>
> the paradigm shift is from programming (giving a clear step by step set
> of instructions) to specifying (if you have an x then do y). this is
> subtle but critical.
>
> my experience training practicing programmers to make this paradigm
> shift is that they struggle.
FWIW, I have done the same observations. In KDE, one of the open source
desktop environments, XSLT and other XML applications are slowly getting more
wide spread, and the typical reactions is that XSLT is a stupid, in complete
language, wide thorough explanations to what it so obviously lacks, compared
to ordinary languages. We have a lot of system programmers, with heavy
procedural backgrounds.
I personally find XSLT hard, when I first looked at it it felt like going back
to stone age. I have as thumbrule to look at another solution as soon as I
want to use a for-each; it surely is an exaggeration, but not that often when
having a procedural background..
Cheers,
Frans
|
