@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.