[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: No side effects holy cow. ( Re: process order (still...)
I think this has nothing to do with me. My point is that for a *very* long time people *are* happy using variables. I don't understand why people should *now* fall in love with functional programming when it has been constantly rejected by 'most of developers' for very long time. This observation about popularity is certainly true. But if you look at what has been happening, the picture is actually quite interesting. The one truly dominant language since the '60s is COBOL. Every other language can be considered as a niche language when the number of programmers of the various languages are compared. Only in the last 10 years that other languages had made any inroad. Right now, probably Visual Basic, C++, and Java are the three languages with many programmers. None I would say is the dominant language. Excel is probably the dominant programming language if you consider Excel as a programming tool. The number of people who are now using Excel is probably greater than the number of programmers for the other languages combined. If you look past the number of people programming in a certain language and look at different domains instead, the picture changes quite a bit. For instance, SQL (mostly side-effect free as well) is dominant in the database field. If you look at telecommunication, it is still mostly C, with more and more C++ and Java thrown in. If you look at web development, most developers know Javascript and some Perl. The AI field has always been Lisp, although Prolog was quite popular for a while. Now, I am not sure where the other functional languages are used for. Miranda is a teaching language I believe. I am not sure about Haskell. SASL is probably dead. Standard ML, CAML, Scheme are taught in universities... However, I am not sure COBOL was popular because people liked it. Maybe IBM really had its influence on what language was used. Same thing with C in telecommunication. Some times, a language is simply something you have to learn to survive (like English was to me when I was younger). But I think somebody should be a mazoshist to be happy with writing 10 lines of <xsl:call-template instead of 2 lines, place the variable outside the stylesheet to use document() hack and do things like that. I just helped a developer to write a recursive named template. I know exactly what you mean. He did not complain about the syntax though. Just something he has to get proficient to handle his job is his attitude. The other thing is that masses are not bying not-obvious concepts. I think that very limited number of people will use the document() - with - 2 - parameters hack. If it takes a long time for *superb* XSL developer to *understand* what is the semantics of some construction ( that has been illustrated by this list ) - that simply means that 'ordinary people' will never use such a ( crazy ) construct. Document() with 2 parameters is also something I have given up explaining to the developers. So far, my experience with the web developers have been a largely positive one. They become frustrated once in a while but it is the same with every tool they have to use. In the internal training session I gave recently, the attitude among the web developers has been very positive. They asked many questions but in general were very receptive to XSLT and XML. Beside HTML, Flash, Photoshop, Director, etc. etc., XML/XSLT is another tool they have to learn. The same thing cannot be said about the software engineers in the session. They are clearly more critical. Being a computer science graduate myself I consider that attitude as a failure of their universities to teach them the right attitude at learning. Regards, Khun Yee XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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