Re: [xml-dev] Parsing XML with anything but

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

On 12/9/13 3:41 PM, Gareth Oakes wrote:
> I have seen this pattern of behaviour goodness knows how many times.
> I present my grand theory for this, in the form of a story…
>
> Imagine you are not an A-grade software developer. You probably
> haven’t completed a formal Software Engineering or Computer Science
> degree. You have meddled with computers enough to be dangerous. You
> got a job as a web developer or “programmer” (using PHP, Visual
> Basic, maybe even .NET).
I hate to interrupt this episode of "other programmers are so stupid,"
but this story does its best to shove blame in a lot of unwarranted 
directions without recognizing that the rest of the world may have a point.

The "Desperate Perl Hacker" was apparently invented by Tim Bray (per
<http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/07/21/DPH>):

> The narrative was something like this: A Vice President with his hair
> on fire runs into a hacker’s cubicle saying “We have to change all
> appearances of ‘Soviet Union’ to ‘Russian Federation’ in the whole
> legal-publications suite and support system and there’s no time and
> no head-count! We’re doomed!” But the Desperate Perl Hacker triumphs,
> because the data is in transparent text files. The D.P.H. was
> repeatedly invoked during the XML design process to support this or
> that simplifying feature.
Text files?  Wow!

While yes, it's true that XML didn't end up supporting the DPH fully - 
see <http://www.xml.com/pub/a/w3j/s3.perl.html> - the behavior you 
complain about was (and often is) seen as a feature, not a bug.

I don't find too many programmers who've written their own XML parsers 
out of stacks of custom regexes.  I do find a lot of people who use 
regexes to extract information from XML documents for tasks that don't 
seem worth the trouble of writing a SAX app or building a DOM tree.

(I manipulate markup with regular expressions pretty frequently, though 
in contexts unlikely to create explosions.)

Yes, it's true that writing applications that apply regular expressions 
or other text processing to "complete" XML can be dangerous.  That 
doesn't mean that people doing that are stupid or poorly trained, 
however, and neither does it mean that they haven't tried their local 
XML toolsets first and found them wanting.

RTFM is not the answer to XML's problems.  Neither is demanding smarter 
programmers.

Thanks,
--
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/