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Re: [xsl] XSLT Hello World
Subject: Re: [xsl] XSLT Hello World From: "Abel Braaksma (Exselt)" <abel@xxxxxxxxxx> Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 19:21:28 +0100 |
On 25-3-2014 18:56, Wendell Piez wrote: > Ihe, > > On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 1:35 PM, Ihe Onwuka <ihe.onwuka@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> Don't get me wrong: I want XML/XSLT to grow and flourish. On the other >>> hand, I don't have to think Javascript and JSON are bad things. On the >>> contrary, I think they help to relieve the pressure on XML/XSLT to be >>> everything to everybody. >> If it's a positive choice - JSON is right for my project. Fine. >> >> If it's a negative choice - XML/XSLT sucks therefore I choose json... >> then it's not a good thing. >> >> Note it's not just Ja/Js. it could be Py/XML Ruby/XML. Same >> considerations apply. > Somehow we look at the same things, yet they (and not I) live in a > world of suckitude. Since these people are their own worst enemies, I > don't know what I can do to help them. You took the words right out of my mouth ;). And surprisingly, I learned a new word, "suckitude". I agree, there is little you can do to help people that cross there arms and shake their head when trying out a new language, finding out it is not what they have been used to and dismissing it as bad because it is different. It is a phenomenon most often seen when shifting paradigms (imperative to functional, literate to procedural etc). Back to topic: I have had my moment of suckitude when starting out with XSLT, especially my struggle with xsl:variable, but thanks to this list and to a moment of going back and learning to understand a different viewpoint to tackle a problem, I find it now hard to live without it. For me, I find the difference between text() and string() clear, but I am now biased. When I explained it to my fellow non-XSLT programmers, it took only a few minutes to explain the differences between a node test and a function call. Luckily, they already knew the DOM, so it simply made sense to them. If you don't, and think in opening and closing tags, I'd understand it to be a tad harder. But frankly, I don't really see the problem with it, yet I can understand the sentiment when being confronted with it the first time. There is no programming language in the world that does not have its peculiarities, not in the least in the hello-world examples. XSLT is a language that typically operates on XML and it is a special purpose, not a general purpose language. A well-known close equivalent is probably SQL. Any hello-world example in that language requires you to understand how to create a (temporary?) table and select data from it. Not easy. Yet SQL is embraced by many people and the same many people love and hate it. For any XSLT hello-world example you need to know how to create XML. Even if you don't (in XSLT 3.0 there does not have to be a default XML input tree anymore), you still need to write you XSLT in XML. I'm just saying: it is not a language for a beginning programmer, at the very least he or she needs to have a basic knowledge of XML and DOM, URIs, Unicode and XPath. I think therefore that any comparison with a general purpose language makes no sense. The original example from Wendell in this thread is an excellent starting point, but has little to do with GPL hello-world examples. But the beauty of it is that you can immediately explain many important concepts of the language without having written anything more than the xsl:stylesheet root element. Cheers, Abel Braaksma Exselt XSLT 3.0 processor http://exselt.net
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