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Dana Rose Ross :heart_trans:

@lettosprey this is exactly the attitude I would expect from someone who isn't alpha sigma black belt XML certified

4 June at 11:32 | Wall-to-wall | Open on lgbt.io
6 comments
Dana Rose Ross :heart_trans:

@lettosprey my experience in the trenches (more or less word for word):

Boss: I read in CIO Magazine about this new thing called XML that's going to revolutionize the industry. I met with the Oracle reps and bought every XML tool they sell.

Devs: What's on the roadmap that requires XML?

Boss: I don't know, but we've spent almost a million dollars on them so you'd better use them.

------

Architect: This new app is going to be based on EJBs that produce XML which we'll convert to HTML through an XSLT transformation.

Me: Wouldn't it be more direct and less fragile to use a JSP?

Architect: Yes, but this way we get to put all of these technologies on our resumes.

@lettosprey my experience in the trenches (more or less word for word):

Boss: I read in CIO Magazine about this new thing called XML that's going to revolutionize the industry. I met with the Oracle reps and bought every XML tool they sell.

Devs: What's on the roadmap that requires XML?

Boss: I don't know, but we've spent almost a million dollars on them so you'd better use them.

4 June at 22:06 | Open on lgbt.io
Elias Mårtenson

@nakedambition @lettosprey oh wow. It this the time forme to tell you about "Water", an XML programming language back in the very early 00's?

When I learned about it at the time, it was just so stupid that I kept looking at it like you can't look away from a car crash. The people behind it were so certain this was the future.

The premise was that the biggest problem with programming languages was that they weren't XML-based. Apparently all your data is XML, so if the programming language is XML too, that would somehow make things, better?

To be fair, this isn't entirely unheard of, since Lisp stores data and code in the same way, and tge makers of Water clearly knew about Lisp since their language took a lot of ideas from it. However, Lisp data has something XML don't, which is a type system.

So what did they do? Well, they added a type system to XML of course. At no point did they consider that perhaps XML wasn't the best format for this stuff. Well, they did, but their solution was to promote something they called "concise xml" which was an abomination that included types, and had some syntax simplifications that has to be seen to be believed. Let's just say that the end result looked like someone took XML, ran it through a grinder and tried to write Lisp with it. My favourite syntax extension: you could put tags inside other tags.

All of this apparently had a one-to-one mapping with regular XML, because again, the biggest problem with web programming was supposedly that everything wasn't XML.

The people behind it was promoting it with the most self-certain attitude I've ever seen. They were so sure of themselves.

Eventually you stopped hearing anything about it, and information about the priject just seemed to disappear. It was kind of weird. I remember trying to figure out what happened, and I came across a news article that was reporting on the main guy being convicted of child molestation and sent to prison. That explains things I guess.

@nakedambition @lettosprey oh wow. It this the time forme to tell you about "Water", an XML programming language back in the very early 00's?

When I learned about it at the time, it was just so stupid that I kept looking at it like you can't look away from a car crash. The people behind it were so certain this was the future.

5 June at 2:56 | Open on functional.cafe
Dana Rose Ross :heart_trans:

@loke @lettosprey I need to find out more about this! It sounds so obnoxiously typical of those days

5 June at 3:43 | Open on lgbt.io
Elias Mårtenson

@nakedambition @lettosprey I just looked it up, and oh... my... It's been revived: waterlang.org

But interestingly enough, there are no actual code examples (kind of obvious, if you knew what it looks like). The blog posts are also written by someone named "orlando", which may be an alias, perhaps by someone who don't want you to google their name.

Thankfully, archive.org provides some historical information. In particular, you may want to read the presentations of the designers where they comapre themselves with K&R as well as John Lennon: web.archive.org/web/2005102605

You can then go and search the name, and you'll find some interesting references, especially regarding how some child molestors change their names to not be as easy to look up.

@nakedambition @lettosprey I just looked it up, and oh... my... It's been revived: waterlang.org

But interestingly enough, there are no actual code examples (kind of obvious, if you knew what it looks like). The blog posts are also written by someone named "orlando", which may be an alias, perhaps by someone who don't want you to google their name.

5 June at 4:39 | Open on functional.cafe
Dana Rose Ross :heart_trans:

@loke @lettosprey this is amazing. On one level it's like a Lisp with angle brackets instead of parentheses. But it's object oriented? And you really weren't kidding about the nested XML?!

5 June at 10:17 | Open on lgbt.io
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