What is XQuery doing wrong and why does it get ignored !?

[Daniela Florescu]

>
> On the other hand, when you look at something like C# 3+ and LINQ, or
> Python with its list comprehensions, or Ruby, or any "mainstreamized"
> FP language (F#, Clojure), or some of the rising stars (Scala) - when
> querying over the corresponding native object models (i.e. ADT trees
> or OO graphs, respectively), their syntax is not all that verbose. VB
> and Scala even have XML literals out of the box - not on par with
> XQuery, mind you, but good enough for 90% of cases.

Beg to differ about the 90%.  That's the 90% XML users who don't  
understand XML,
and just put angle brackets all over.

What about the complex enterprise schemas ?

What if I have to process HL7 ? Or XBRL ? Or NIEM ? ACORD ? NavyXML ?
CIDX ? GML ? MISMO ? US_GAAP? SVG ?

Good luck to whoever tries to process those with C#, Python, or  
whatever else,
closures, or not closures.

>
> Performance behavior is predictable

Yes, imperative languages's performance is predictable, and  
predictably bound to be low :-)

Sorry, could not resist...

>
>
> In XQuery, I have to jump through hoops with
> closures to return two sequences from a function (and then pray that
> the optimizer of my implementation can special-case that trick!), and
> that's for the draft 1.1

OK. You identified problem #1. Lack of structures.


I can't describe types in XQuery
> itself,

OK. Problem #2.

but the lack of type polymorphism is also limiting for a
> language with explicit type declarations.

Ok. Problem #3.

>
> Still, I guess, ultimately it boils down to this: if you want XQuery
> to be more popular, you have to convince people that XML (XDM, really)
> is _the_ way to represent data

I think it is. And I'll tell you why. It's NOT because it's a great  
data model,
far from that. Not in my worst database nightmare I wouldn't have  
designed
something like  XDM.

But it's "good enough"  to generalize all the other ones (relational,  
RDF, JSON,
documents).

And it's there, and unavoidable, and  that's the main advantage.


> . Everything else is secondary.

I agree. Everything else is secondary.


Best regards
Dana
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