Cranky old farts and the static typing critics (was Re: [xml-dev] Ten new XQuery, XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 Working Drafts)

> <Quote>
> XML-DEV is a festival of cranky old men complaining about the "youth of
> today" and how things were better in the XML world in the old days. 
> </Quote>

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/05/08/FutureLanguage
"there's some powerful intellectual ferment in progress out there. This may 
be the golden age of programming, as Paul Graham argues, and maybe 
everything we thought we knew about strong typing is wrong."

Just who is a cranky old fart these days, the "XML is just text, dammit" 
SGML dinosaurs, or the "Static type checking will solve your problems" 
young turks?  As former young turk who is now a cranky old dinosaur once 
put it back in the Dark Ages, "Don't speak too soon, for the wheel's still 
in spin, and the times they are a' changin."