Re: [xml-dev] My vote for the coolest technologies of 2014

[Peter Hunsberger <peter.hunsberger@gmail.com>]

I'd venture Text might have been the coolest technology sometime around 6000 BC? Regex might have hit the mark sometime around 1960? I was definitely enamored with Schematron sometime in the early 2000's.  Yes, they persist as useful technologies, but I don't see why one would nominate 2014 as having been any different than any of the preceding years in that regard?

Personally, Waze grew into a reliable tool (at least in this neck of the woods) over 2014 and became useful on an almost daily basis.  So I'd nominate it as #3.  The Nest system and it's associated infrastructure is also gaining some traction in my household and it's certainly cool. Like Tei smartphones make the top of my list, but not in general, I'd pick the OnePlus One as my personal favorite technology for the year; 3Gb memory, quad core, 64GB flash, great cameras, Cyanogen 11 and more all for $350 marks a definite turning point for these devices.

On Tue Dec 30 2014 at 6:37:37 AM Costello, Roger L. <costello@mitre.org> wrote:

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

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