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

"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. Consider the following:

OO Guru: ... and the most wonderful thing about the Object Oriented paradigm is that you are GOING TO BE ABLE TO RE-USE CODE! (background music crescendo).

Skeptic: That sounds good, but we currently have over a trillion dollars worth of existing code, written in FORTRAN, BASIC, and COBOL. What should we do with that code?

OO Guru Throw it all away!

That's bad manners, IMO.

Or how about this,

Consultant: Whovever worte this code should be taken out to the parking lot and shot!
Manager: Gee, when I wriote it five years ago, I thought it looked pretty good!
Consultant (backpedaling): ... well ... on the other hand, it does have a few very good points to it...

That's bad manners!

> 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.

>
> > The idea that one of them should be declared "bunk" and the other
should
> > prevail is, in my mind, worse than bunk.
>
> 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.

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! Received on Mon Oct 18 2004 - 18:11:41 CEST