I am sure FreeMarker is a fine and wonderful thing, but I couldn't let this
pass unchallenged.... :->
At 08:13 AM 6/25/2003, Jonathan Revusky wrote:
the underlying procedural logic will come more naturally to most people
than the declarative/functional programming model embodied by XSLT.
I've written and taught XSLT extensively, to a wide range of kinds of
audiences from hard-core developers to web-heads to professors and graduate
students of (natural) languages and literatures.
The programming model embodied by XSLT is perfectly "natural" when it's
understood for what it is, and not confused with some other model. It
doesn't take a CS degree to understand it: in fact the beauty of the
declarative approach, as Mike Kay just pointed out in another thread, is
that it takes so much of the "nonsense" of programming the machine off the
table (not nonsense to the machine, to be sure, but oh what a bore), by
letting the implementor of the engine take care of it so the stylesheet
writer doesn't have to think about it.
I submit that Jonathan's claim is true only for a subset of the potential
user base of XSLT -- namely those who can't or don't (for whatever reason)
take the time to come to grips with what's different about it, and what
makes it so powerful and effective at doing what it does well. Perhaps, in
the day of Perl and Javascript hacking, when people so often shortcut their
learning in order to get something rigged up and out the door (i.e. there's
a lot of pound-foolishness to go with all the penny-wisdom), this is a
larger subset than one would like ... but it is by no means true that
everyone finds XSLT difficult. I have witnessed more than one
"non-programmer" jump out of their chairs with excitement on discovering
how "easy" XSLT is....
Regards,
Wendell
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