...makes me pine for the heady days of emacs vs. vi.
Anyway, I've been tasked with trying to prove that development environment X is a better choice than development environment Y. Along the way, there will also be discussion about whether database system A is better than database system B, so forth, and so on. In the ensuing discussion, we will have to visit the topic of whether "XML databases" (whatever that means) and XSLT are good ideas.
In researching other people's opinions about XSLT, we came across some old blog posts here and here. The first makes the claim that XSLT is the spawn of Satan, with which I wholeheartedly agree. But more amusing to me are the comments, especially from XSLT proponents.
Why is it that XSLT proponents claim that one must "get the functional programming mindset" before one can get XSLT? I think this is a tool they use to postpone the inevitable. The inevitable being a realization that XSLT is actually just a PhD student's wet dream, and not a programming language. But it is used to deflect discussion until, presumably, the anti-XSLT party has come up to the intellectual level of the pro-XSLT party. Since so few programmers are prepared to discuss functional programming, the odds are that the real discussion is averted.
So I would like to say this: why would "getting the functional programming mindset" convince anyone that it's a good idea to write hundreds of lines of syntactically excruciating code to accomplish what one or two lines of Lisp or Haskell would accomplish?
The claim seems to be that in some parallel universe of which most programmers are unaware, this actually makes sense. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that no such universe exists. Could be just me.
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