Re: The wisdom of the object mentors (Was: Searching OO Associations with RDBMS Persistence Models)

From: erk <eric.kaun_at_gmail.com>
Date: 14 Jun 2006 07:30:29 -0700
Message-ID: <1150295429.225847.304400_at_h76g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>


Keith H Duggar wrote:
> In the end just as you found (if I understood you correctly)

You did.

> XML sucked for serialization of program parameters/data for
> my applications as you said /DESPITE/ the availability of
> parsers.

Given languages like Lisp and Scheme and their use of S-expressions and macros, languages like Ruby with their extensible hooks into the language runtime and thus better support for DSLs, and even the existence of tools like JavaCC for generating parsers... well, there's just no excuse. XML seems primarily suited, if not solely for the trashbin, then for completely static languages with no support for DSLs at all.

> I kept falling back to flat files. Refinements on
> those ultimately led to my interest in the relational
> model.

Heh - agreed. Ironically (hopefully it's irony, if not someone can tell me what it is) the most interesting use I've yet seen for XML is conveying the contents of a relation (Date have an example in his Introduction tome). Oh, and for describing a UI, at least most of them. Still, XML pales in comparison to other techniques.

> As for the XML/XSLT apps I mentioned, well it did
> work and I didn't even really mind the verbosity. However, I
> did mind that I had to learn so many /different/ languages
> to do useful work (XML/XSL/DTD/HTML/CSS/XPath/MathML/SVG,
> XML attribute syntax, etc). I kept wondering why the hell
> all these were not simply Lisp and wishing that this were
> so, ie that HTML had been Lisp from it's inception like
>
> (html( (body( ... )body) )html)
>
> or similar. Then it seemed that all the other alphabet soup
> would have been superfluous and never "invented". And I
> could of done much more by learning a single syntax along
> with the usual programming knowledge.

Hear, hear! I'm diving into Lisp more thoroughly now, and desperately hoping I can find a job in it and escape from XJavaland.

> Now I feel the XGurus cheated us, and wasted the valuable
> time of many (or all) of us.

Agreed. It's fairly telling that (in a link I don't care to look up), Tim Bray mentioned the most important part of XML is its internationalization. To whit: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>. Wow! Having an "encoding" attribute at the top of the file! What a breakthrough!

> Same here. How do you like Tutorial D?

I do like it, although I'm not well-versed enough yet in more robust type theories to really comment. I do appreciate their relational operators, and their discussions of values and variables, and the effect of "mutators" on proper constrained type handling, rings true given years of odious experience in O-O land.  

  • Eric
Received on Wed Jun 14 2006 - 16:30:29 CEST

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