RE: [xml-dev] SGML complexity

[<juanrgonzaleza@canonicalscience.com>]

Michael Kay said:
>>
>> About XSLT, it is interesting to take a look to September TPC index
>>
>> [http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm]
>>
>
> It's also interesting that "XSLT programming" gets three times as many
> hits as "Haskell programming" on Google, yet XSLT is below Haskell in
> their ranking. Something fishy there.

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22Javascript+programming%22&btnG=Search]

gives us 1,760,000 hits

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22Haskell+programming%22&btnG=Search]

gives us 36,100 hits

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22XSLT+programming%22&btnG=Search]

gives us 17,800.

i.e. 1/2 that of Haskell and however, the TPC for XSLT is not 50% that of
Haskell.

The difference between TPC indices for Haskell and XSLT is really small
(12%). Discussion about that may be irrelevant. The interesting is in the
popularity indices for XSLT when compared to PHP, Javascript...

> Also, a lot of people persist in calling it XSL; and a lot of XSLT
> developers don't think of it as programming ("programming" is part of
> their search term).

Yeah, but also many people uses 'JS' (or even 'Ecmascript') when speaking
of Javascript or script instead program. It is complex.

> And it's not measuring popularity, it's measuring number of mentions. I
> hope no language is in the list because everyone wants to say how much
> they hate it, but you never know.

Well, They say

<blockquote>
The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the
popularity of programming languages.
</blockquote>

On any case, your remark is correct and maybe also XSLT can be receiving
over hits because people hate it.

a search by "?? sucks" returns two times more hits in Google for XSLT than
for Haskell.

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22Haskell+sucks%22&btnG=Search]

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22XSLT+sucks%22&btnG=Search]

Does that mean that XSLT sucks twice than Haskell?

> Whichever way you look at it, XSLT is ranked at about #50 in the list,
> which makes it about the most "popular" special-purpose language in the
> ranking.

I can see special-purpose languages above in the popularity ranking, e.g.
matlab. In a search in amazon, i can find Matlab is far more popular than
XSLT -search for Haskell is difficult because interference-.

[http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b/103-0404746-8186229?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=xslt&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go]

[http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b/103-0404746-8186229?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Matlab&Go.x=10&Go.y=8&Go=Go]

I would agree that XSLT is the most popular of XML-based languages ;-)

> Michael Kay
> http://www.saxonica.com/


Juan R.

Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)