My vote for the coolest technologies of 2014

["Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>]

Hi Folks,

Here's my vote for the coolest technologies of 2014:

1. Text (not binary)

2. Regular expressions (regexes)

3. Schematron

Text allows us to interact with computers at a human level. I think the text abstraction is one of mankind's most monumental achievements. I see text-based formats on the rise while binary formats are pushed to lower and lower levels of the computing stack.

Regexes power everything, it seems. They allow us to express razor-sharp data constraints in XML Schemas and JSON Schemas. They are the primary tool used to describe tokens in lexical analyzers. 

Schematron is simple and yet extraordinarily powerful. Whoever created the XSLT program to convert a Schematron document into an executable XSLT program should get a Turing Award, it's fantastic.

What's your vote for the coolest technologies of 2014?

/Roger