RE: [xml-dev] SGML complexity

[<juanrgonzaleza@canonicalscience.com>]

Michael Kay said:
>> >
>>
>> [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22Haskell+programmi
>> ng%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
>
> You put the search terms in quotes, e.g. "XSLT programming".
>
> If "XSLT" scores 3*"Haskell", while "XSLT programming" scores
> 0.5*"Haskell programming", that is indeed interesting: it shows that
> most people talking about XSLT don't think of it as programming.

Let me paraphrase your own reasoning:

If "XSLT sucks" scores 2*"Haskell sucks", that is indeed interesting: it
shows that most people talking about XSLT think of it as sucking.

I do _not_ think that XSLT sucks but I believe that other approaches as
JS, PHP, and ASP, between others may be far more popular.

> Which means that the site's assumptions are basically flawed.

Too far conclusion.

> After all, the words "program" and "programming" don't appear anywhere
> in the XSLT 1.0 specification, whereas they appear more than 20 times in
> the two-page introduction to the Haskell spec...

Yes, still XSLT is thought as programing language in several sites,
articles, and enciclopedias. Including the books "XSLT: Programmer's
Reference" and "XSLT 2.0 Programmer's Reference" both from you.

> I guess you can use statistics to prove anything you want to prove, and
> since you seem to have a very negative attitude to most XML
> technologies,

I do not know from where you got my 'attitude' not how you measured the
'most'. XML has both strenghts and weakness.

Moreover, I -contrary to you- am not intellectually (W3C XSLT 2 editor) or
economically (Saxon) linked to XSLT.

> it's not surprising that you should choose data that's
> biased against them.

Well, let me remember you that I remarked that differences between XSLT
and Haskell are so small that probably the difference is not significative
and probably XSLT was more popular than Haskell.

However, a simple Amazon query proves that you find many more books on
Maple than XSLT and that is also a kind of popularity index.

However, I sincerely doubt that you can reject that larger TPC index of
PHP or JavaScript over XSLT is an outcome of 'flawed' statistics or
'biased' data.

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


Juan R.

Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)