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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Various presentations, schema concepts, etc.
 Matt Sergeant writes: >Declarative programming really isn't that new a concept, although the >development of declarative techniques is getting better (I suppose you >could have said the same about OO when it was becoming the "next big >thing" too). I'm not convinced its really the next wave though - like >functional programming its just too hard to grok for non comp sci people >(and there are a lot of them in this field who are going to need to be >able to work with us). Yet whenever this thread is picked up on XSL-List (remember XSL is said to be a declarative language -- not that I would know, I'm not a "comp sci" person), as soon as some CS person says XSLT is hard, some layout designer or other steps forward and says, "I'm using XSL and I think it's easy." The whole virtue of a declarative language is that once you understand the formal data model(s) and processing semantics, you don't need to know what goes on under the surface: if the processor operates in conformance to spec, and the spec is properly designed to provide for clean implementations, it doesn't matter. It is then shocking and surprising what a naive user, who has never been programmed by counters and for-loops, can do, even torturing the language when necessary (in XSLT, writing recursive named templates for user-defined functions, adapting cunning uses of built-in functions, etc. etc.) to achieve unanticipated ends. Rick Jelliffe writes: >I remember [Dr John Reekie's] >suggestion, after working with functional programming techiques (and >liking them very much) was that perhaps they require a too high level >of abstraction for typical programmer (typically trained programmers?), >compared to procedural code (we are used to assignment): he thought that >mediating the functions through a GUI might make FP more attractive. Mmhm: which may help explain the XSLT-for-humanists phenomenon. Personally I don't think the GUI is the answer, at least not GUIs we have now, which are pretty pathetic at representing either the data models or the processing. But training and experience in thinking about information at a high level of abstraction might be just the ticket. Possibly an education studying textual forms, their applications and transformations over the history of media technologies for the last, say, 6000 years? My dream XML education would include some Greek or Latin or Classical Chinese. Plenty of Rhetoric, some Prosody and theory of narrative form. When Shelley said the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, he was referring to the schema designers responsible for your wetware architecture. But then, that's my side of the camel. Regards, Wendell Piez ====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@m... Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ====================================================================== *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ *************************************************************************** 
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