Re: [xsl] XSLamenT

["Abel Braaksma (online)" <abel.online@xxxxxxxxx>]

A couple of PS's to my original reply ;)

>
> Certainly, if someone has arrived at grade 5 in school and still
> doesn't know the alphabet, this person will find reading even
> ordinary text rather "daunting".

The alphabet, in a few languages, only comprises about 26 letters
(the lucky hawaiians  only use 18), but even  after many years of
experience I don't pretend to be a perfect writer. Nor will I ever 
become a perfect software writer, let alone a perfect  XSLT or FXSL
writer to which 'alphabets' I only spend much less time to learn.

>
> Going by the last few days messages, it seems to this, yet another
> humble lowercase, xslter, that the "general public" cannot even
> get their heads around xsl:apply-templates, let
> around the fold, map, compose, repeat/iterate alphabet of FXSL.

People are  often spoiled with lousy languages giving them the
opportunity to see results quickly. 20 minutes in VB or PHP or Ruby
or Rebol and you have your first application running. But can you
program? The difference between Property Let, Set and Get is vital
for understanding VB well, but only few know how to apply it
correctly, let alone understand  object counting and releasing,
distributed objects etc (though all very much part of the same VB
language).

Same with apply-templates, with one difference, you don't see some
first results in 20 minutes giving you false hope that you can
master it quickly. Instead, you should study it for about a day, or
someone else has to help you (but didn't someone else help us years
on end  with learning to write period?). And you can't draw windows
and buttons with it, yet (but was that really part of the popular
languages? Visual tools seem out of place with XSLT to me).


> of the xsl-list, but, it does seem to me that somehow the XSLT meme*
> is not replicating as we would all hope for in the minds of the
> wider I.T. community.

No, as WML will never be applicable to the wider IT community, but a
necessity to some. It is special purpose and the wider IT community
is more concerned about general programming. The next big revolution
to all problems that will hit the market will always be a general
purpose tool, language, methodology, dictionary or whatever. That's
why Big Brother is so popular and why soap opera's are: it is
'general purpose': to a large crowd it provides a solution.

>
> Is the XSLT community somehow just wanting to keep this good oil to
> itself, or is it
> failing to articulate the paradigm in common language?

Perhaps failing, surely not wanted to keep it from others. It is
always hard to 'feel at home' in another paradigm, much as it is
hard to feel at home in a natural language with very different
grammar  and semantics (try Greenlandic where nouns are folded
together or Navajo, where verbs are used where 'we' would use
nouns). But once you master it, it really 'feels at home' and you
start liking the greener grass at the other side :)

Cheers,
Abel