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

"Laconic2" <laconic2_at_comcast.net> wrote in message news:eKCdnZ0l2-3Xdu7cRVn-og_at_comcast.com...
>
> "Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote in message
> news:4cRcd.279776$3l3.251950_at_attbi_s03...
>
> > Actually, I think the LISPers, (for all their bad manners :-) have gotten
> > a whole lot of things really right, and they did it decades ahead of
> > anyone else realizing there was an issue.
> >
> Bad manners DO matter. [...]

Agreed! The way LISP people respond in newsgroups has been an enormous turn-off for me, and has probably led me to pay less attention to the language than it deserves.

> > But, as far as data management goes, they don't do so well; "Lisp program"
> > as schema doesn't work as well as declarative schema-- Lisp is untyped.
> > (But not as severely as XML.) Same issue with query language; it's better
> > to write a declarative, content-addressing query than a procedure.
> >
>
> Some variants of Lisp were typed.

Really? Like, statically typed? Types were checked at compile time?

> > What if one of them *is* bunk, though? Or, not exactly bunk, but deeply,
> > deeply flawed? A good idea at the core, surrounded by a whole host
> > of bad implementation.
> >
> There *are* ideas that are so flawed as to deserve debunking, right from the
> outset. Neither Lisp nor XML belong in that category, IMO.

[It was not my intention at all to suggest there was anything about LISP that needs debunking. LISP is an impressive achievement.]

I'm not sure if XML makes the grade. It's designed for storing data. (Not really for transferring data, as we often say; it's just an inert file format, with nothing transfer-related in its nature.) But it's lousy at it. It doesn't have types. It doesn't have schema. It doesn't have relations. It doesn't have links. What it does have, nested name-value pairs, it has several confusingly different ways. People are busy trying to retrofit some of these things in, but I am not expectant of success.

XML does actually have one awesome idea in it, which is the idea of the Universal File Format. This one great idea is responsible for 100% of the success of XML, and nothing I say about XML should be construed as saying that that's not Just A Damn Good Idea. But a good idea by itself is not enough; execution matters.

> What might deserve debunking is this: "Now that we have XML, nobody needs
> a DBMS, anymore."
> These people are going to get caught by Spight's Law!

Heh heh! Yeah, it bites 'em every time. Only trouble is, they don't know what bit 'em!

Marshall Received on Tue Oct 19 2004 - 07:45:26 CEST