Re: [xml-dev] Feasibility of "do all application coding in the XML langu

["James Fuller" <james.fuller.2007@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Mukul Gandhi <gandhi.mukul@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Roger,
>   There are many software applications, which need imperative
> programming infrastructure (where we should be able to change program
> state at will, like using assignment statement as so on).

hmmm, I am personally confused as to where imperative programming
languages plot these days ... I blame the stateless web for this and
that the average age of a lot of FORTRAN, COBOL, and ALGOL (I love the
way all those are caps) developers means there is natural progression
to ignoring fads. I think perhaps the single largest reason is
advances in hardware enabling us to use a lot of the power of other
programming idioms, that were not possible before.

> Examples of such applications could be,
> 1. Complex business logic (say I am implementing a work flow for an
> insurance company)

look at all the middleware happening thats based on web services
(tibco is a representative company using XML everywhere)

> 2. Game programming :)

I am not a gamer, but I have heard that world of warcraft is heavily
doped up with XML

> 3. GUI programming

reminds me of glade http://glade.gnome.org/
and I would point you towards silverlight


> To my opinion, none of the above tasks can be done (or easily done) in
> XML based languages.

in the hands of a master I think all these tasks could be done in a
lot of languages ... in fact I think I have seen all three of the
flavours of apps you mention programmed successfully in postscript of
all things!

> Whereas XML based languages are specialized to process XML data.

I agree, XML based languages are best in situations where there is a
lot of XML around.

cheers, Jim Fuller