Re: OXR/OR Mapping Was RE: [xml-dev] Native XML Interfaces

[Uche Ogbuji <uche@ogbuji.net>]

On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 3:30 PM, David Lee <dlee@calldei.com> wrote:

Software has gotten so complicated that most people simply dont have the time in their entire career to learn everything,

so they pick what they want to learn, what their boss tells them to learn and for the rest pick what seems easiest - and if it works you stop there.   And for a lot of people that is not bad or wrong.  The universe of programmers is not what it was 30 years ago.  There is a huge amount of jobs for people to "just" put together pre-built parts.   Expecting everyone to be an expert at everything is unrealistic.

People don't need to be an expert at everything.  The era from von Neumann through David Bentley is well over, and I don't think anyone imagines it's not.

 

And face it, you *do* have to know XML quite well to use the "simple" tools ... and when to choose them over more complex tools.

This is where I disagree.  I do think you need to be an expert at XML to do certain things with certain tools.  But I don't believe the simple data extract mentioned here is one of those things.  The problem is that the tools which are always the first on the marquee are rarely fit for purpose for any task, and XML does too poor a job at showing the desperate hacker the way to accomplish basic tasks.

In other words, the problem is one not of expectations but rather education.

 

When do you pick DOM or SAX or StAX or XSLT or XQuery or xmlsh or XPath or XProc ? To actually make a useful decision on this you actually have to learn ALL of them

Only if you truly expect in your job to come across the full profile of problems that require this long list.  I think very few developers ever do, and so for most I do think just learning one toolkit, and preferably the easiest one, is fine.  The problem is that developers faced with XML tend to learn only one toolkit...but it tends to be the most complicated one.

Again it's only our own fault.

--
Uche Ogbuji                       http://uche.ogbuji.net
Founding Partner, Zepheira        http://zepheira.com
http://wearekin.org
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/author/uogbuji/
http://copia.ogbuji.net
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ucheogbuji
http://twitter.com/uogbuji