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Uche Ogbuji wrote: > > I don't use C#, so I can't judge, but I use SQL a lot, and it ties my head in knots as often as XSLT does. I don't necessarily consider this a failing in SQL. Luckily for me, I started heavy lifting with SQL long after many good books were available (and at a time when Usenet produced very ready answers to almost all the nasty problems I encountered with the language). One can hardly ignore the fact that useful SQL queries can be written on one line using fewer than a dozen keywords. One also cannot disregard the fact that every major vendor has added procedural extension to SQL (PL/SQL, Transact-SQL, PL/PgSQL, etc). I wonder how much the acceptance of SQL has been aided by interactive monitors or shells that normally ship with RDBMS suites. In addition to their main function, they can be used to check short pieces of code for syntax and sanity of results without writing full-fledged programs or stylesheets. Mike Champion wrote: > I have a lot of admiration for XSLT > and the people who invented it, implemented it, and can explain it; just don't > expect the people who are now out there developing applications with Visual Basic, > Crystal Reports, Dreamweaver, Oracle Forms, etc. to grok XSLT without a lot of struggle. And for many of the people who are accustomed to IDEs the first stumbling block is using text editors and command lines. Products like XML Spy only go so far - XML is still based on files and processes, not drag and drop. Earlier in this thread people suggested that it is difficult to use XML without understanding its underlying concepts. I would go farther and say that the divide between 'geekdom' and 'mainstream' is not on this language or that, but on a much more basic level of groking the operating environment. Ari.
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