Re: [xml-dev] Re: Native XML Interfaces

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

On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 11:28 PM, Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie> wrote:
> The dev|eng|prog or whoever (remember the DPH?) has a set of working
> tools, as we all have in our own field. Their perception of information
> and information-manipulation problems -- and ours -- is conditioned by
> their familiarity with their tools ("Nail Hammer Soup", as Len said) and
> with the types of information they regularly deal with.

DPH's don't have issues working with XML (or any data format!) ...
they have surrounded themselves with advanced tools from the future
from the gods Perl and Unix ... though admittedly on that future
timeline the 'atomic compute operation' was based on a line of text
terminated  with  U+000D U+000A.

So I state (something very obvious) that we want to evolve from text
based line by line processing to document based.

There is a problem with this evolutionary step ... streaming ...  we
still want the flexibility of looking at the node level as we process
or even looking at the document as text as well as 'document'
orientated processing.

> Introduce pointy brackets, and you are adding a new concept for which
> they have no tools. Provide training, and they will see that there are
> tools to deal with pointy brackets. But unless you also deal with the
> connection between conceptualisation and perception, they will still see
> the pointy-bracket world as another, perhaps interesting, parallel
> universe to the one they regularly work in. The only connecting tissue
> is the information itself.

yes, and XML is a bit 'uppity' as a data format ... text processing is
buried into the toolbox of every programming language with rich
primitives, whereas XML stands alone and owns your data and demands
that your execution environment follow a specific interface when
interacting with that data.

When using languages that work directly with XML then productivity
becomes very high, but using those languages means learning quite a
few foreign concepts. In languages like XSLT or XQuery we are starting
to have more full blown functional programming. So even while js folks
are adopting a kind of functional programming they've also adopted the
'graph of callbacks' .. which just seems so wrong to this programmer,
which I'm willing to be shouted down by many folks until the day my
mortal coil fails.

XML's independent attitude is great when it comes to avoiding lockin
but it also means that programs (w/o XML primitives built in) will
have to work harder.

As for parallel universes, I find it strange that folks who work with
pointy brackets elsewhere (html) get so worked up or flummoxed by XML
... clearly XML is a brother or sister in terms of the technological
tree of life and everything else well, distant half cousins.

I do agree that for end users and for a certain category of developer,
showing them pointy brackets is akin to saying "here is a hex editor,
go edit that binary" did in 1990.

ah .. starting to ramble now ....

Jim Fuller