Re: XML: The good, the bad, and the ugly

"Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote in message news:rVIcd.267691$D%.111425_at_attbi_s51...

> > It's a recreation of Lisp s-expressions produced by people that got
> > there by hacking on SGML who, as likely as not, didn't know they'd get
> > s-exprs, and wound up with something less good...
>
> Exactly.

I went scurrying off to the web to refresh my memory about Lisp s-expressions, and I ran across a paper comparing XML and s-expressions. I'm going to paste one paragraph in here:

<quote>
Nor is it an accident of history that Lisp programmers never came up with these technologies for Lisp data. The central idea of the XML family of standards is to separate code from data. The central idea of Lisp is that code and data are the same and should be represented the same. The Lisp community's idea of "Schema" would likely be "Lisp program". The Lisp community's idea of "addressing language" would likely be "Lisp program." The Lisp community's idea of "query language" would likely be "Lisp program." Unfortunately this response ignores the Principle of Least Power. </quote>

I haven't finished understanding the paper well enough to comment on it, but this paragraph illustrates my current pet peeve, the "everything is a..." model of reality. The idea that Lisp and XML are expanding on opposite central ideas appeals to me.
The idea that one of them should be declared "bunk" and the other should prevail is, in my mind, worse than bunk. (I was about to say "meta-bunk", but that might cause too much argument).

It reminds me of the guy who tried to persuade me that Eastern philosophy is better than Western philosophy. I let him go on for a while. Then I said, "when you compare the two philosophies by determining which one is better, you are only showing me how Western your mind still is!"

(-:
Grasshopper, do you see the mountain?
Mountain, do you see the grasshopper?

:-) Received on Mon Oct 18 2004 - 14:57:02 CEST