Re: [xsl] [Musing] User Preference for Functional Programming

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yes, and it's also a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"XPath is hard because I've never learned it."

To be fair to the reluctant Java programmers, there is one thing to be
said for their argument. As soon as you are past the trivially easy,
XPath requires that you have some reasonable understanding of its data
model. This presents a difficulty for those who are used to relying on
accessor functions. In some lines of work (I hear) that is more or
less a necessity.

In this context, "maintain" means "figure out what it does after I've
forgotten". (And that is a reasonable definition to keep in mind.)

So, what Liam said.

Cheers, Wendell


On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 3:32 PM, Ihe Onwuka <ihe.onwuka@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 8:11 PM, Hank Ratzesberger <xml@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Hi Liam,
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 10:54 AM, Liam R E Quin <liam@xxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>>>   /award/awardID/awardContractID/modNumber=FpdsInfo:modNum
>>>
>
>
> snipped
>
>>
>> And yet programmers decided that xpath was more difficult to maintain than
>> object notation.  And I think this is a common complaint. But I have never
>> heard anyone complain that they can't understand a Unix file path, e.g.
>>
>
> That one is easy to explain because it is a phenomenon that frequently
> repeats itself. See the second quote.
>
> http://strangewondrous.net/browse/author/r/robinson+james+harvey
>



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Wendell Piez | http://www.wendellpiez.com
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