Don Xml's Grok This

	Do We Love XSLT Because It Is Difficult To Learn? M. David (on his XSLTBlog) asks why some of us are drawn to XSLT and has a great quote (well sort of quote) from Tim Bray from a late night drinking session at XMLDevCon: to understand XSLT you must first reach up with both hands and grab the two halves of your brain peeling each back until you have successfully turned your brain completely inside out M. David thinks that it is just because XSLT is hard to learn, and we love to torture ourselves.  Me, well I think that some of us realize (in the deep dark recesses of our brains) that procedural programming (aka what most people call programming) is preventing us from reaching out full potential and that some form of declarative programming is the future.  XSLT reminds us that there is more then just procedural programming out there, and we really have to stop and open our minds to other forms of programming.  I think that once we get beyond the coding everything procedurally mentality, we will finally be able to develop systems that actually learn, and are not just programmed (Domain Specific Langauges  hint at just the beginning of our trip down that path). Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Published Sunday, December 12, 2004 5:09 PM by donxml Filed under: XML Comment Notification If you would like to receive an email when updates are made to this post, please register here Subscribe to this post's comments using RSS Comments TrackBack said: December 12, 2004 5:10 PM RichB said: I like XSLT because once I've got something working it usually works for all possible cases. This never happens with imperative programming. My dislikes of XSLT are fixed in XSLT 2.0 (hello Microsoft? Where are you?) December 14, 2004 3:26 PM jp said: I love XSLT but I dont consider XSLT programming language more than HTML or XML. It's just way to build templates. I think most programmers compare XSLT to C# etc. December 15, 2004 6:09 AM David Douglass said: After 30 years of procedural programming perhaps my brain does need to be turned inside out. Nonetheless, in my experience with XSLT I’ve found it inadequate in several important areas: 1) Lucidity: when you look a piece of code it should not be difficult to understand or easy to misinterpret. The verbosity and density of XSLT work against this. 2) Encapsulation: the facilities for this simply aren’t as mature as they are in a modern OO language. 3) Reuse: again, lacking compared to a modern OO language. December 15, 2004 6:24 PM TrackBack said: December 20, 2004 1:58 PM Frank said: Using XSLT reminds me of the way Yoda speaks. The words are all the same and you can understand him, but everything is backwards and after a while you get a headache. It's funny. German has a similiar word order (verbs tend to get pushed to the end of the sentence), but when I speak German, my mind accepts the fact that the word order is different. Since it feels like a different language, there's a clear line in my mind between my native tongue (English) and German. My point is that since XSLT resembles the programming languages and tools we already use, but does so in "reverse" order. Hence, the confusion. December 21, 2004 7:28 AM

About donxml

I’m an independent consultant, specializing in .Net solutions architecture, based out of New Jersey who also doubles as an evangelist for XML, Domain Driven Design, enterprise architecture and .Net. I do not work for Microsoft, the W3C or any other big company that you may know of (at least not yet). I’ve been an indie for over ten years, and although I’ve been tempted a couple times to take a job with companies like Microsoft, I’ve haven’t found something better than my current situation. I work mostly with the large pharmaceuticals that are based here in New Jersey, and usually find myself on long term contracts. Definitely not the prototypical indie consultant, but it lets me dedicate time to my non-income generating activities like the developer community stuff, plus financing open source projects like XPathmania and MVP-XML. If you would like to talk to me about doing some contract work, just contact me via the contact page. My rates vary widely, depending on lots of different variables, but mostly distance from Jersey, and type of work. Plus, I’ve been known to donate some of my code for various projects.