RE: [xml-dev] 2007 Predictions

["Len Bullard" <cbullard@hiwaay.net>]

Or you get wire wheels with a spinner that comes off if you don't tighten it
enough.  See Alpines and MGs.  Well, at least in Britain.  In America, we
use nails and bolts.  They never come off.  Ever.

The declarative vs procedural bit is more interesting though.  That can't
just be a trend.  There are tradeoffs there.  Is it a lifecycle phase? It
seems to me that things start out procedural and only become declarative at
the point where the data is reasonably known and scoped.  This should be
particularly true of standards where getting it wrong early has a cost later
in that the tree gets very bushy with variants.   

That is the position the youngun's are taking on the X3D list and given our
experience with premature standards, it is hard to disagree.  So is the
reason that procedural is more flexible and it is better to keep it
complicated until simplification is obvious (which would contradict the more
trendy programming methods of late)?  

Save the 'its always a mix anyway' thread killers until someone really can't
figure this one out.  That's an admission there is no difference.

Any takers?

len


From: Michael Champion [mailto:mc@xegesis.org] 

Yeah, but as Douglas Crockford so memorably put it "The good thing about
reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one."
http://scripting.wordpress.com/2006/12/20/scripting-news-for-12202006/#comme
nt-26383  Each generation of this stuff is a bit rounder.

> On the other hand, I wonder about everything becoming declarative.  It
seems reasonable 
> to those of us who are old enough to remember ...

Agreed. The declarative vs procedural discussion has been hot on and off
since at least the 1970s 

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?FORM=&q=declarative+procedural+controver
sy 
http://www.google.com/search?q=declarative+procedural+controversy 

Web 1.0 pushed the pendulum toward the declarative (SQL + XSLT) side, Web
2.0 made the world safe for imperative Javascript, now XQueryP is proposed
to nudge XQuery in the imperative direction and LINQ is moving C# and VB in
the declarative direction.  That thing isn't going to stop swinging anytime
soon.