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[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XSLT model not "natural"? [was Re: [ANN] FreeMarke
 I am sure FreeMarker is a fine and wonderful thing, but I couldn't let this pass unchallenged.... :-> That's fine. It suits my purposes for there to be dialogue on this. I have not responded earlier simply because I was too busy moving house. First of all, you surely understand that my announcement was advocacy material and I made my biases quite clear for the reader.
Well, I can't help but make the casual comment that professors and graduate students, i.e. academics, are much more intellectually oriented than the general population, and I would say, more likely to be open to stretching their minds than the average person. I would guess that you are a talented teacher and trainer and are good at conveying the core concepts to people. However, the fact that you can make a living teaching XSLT already suggests that it is not that easy!
The above argument is not very convincing to me. That something is natural once you understand it is surely true of any conceptually challenging thing. For example, first-year calculus is probably very simple when understood for what it is. This does not alter the fact that very many people have found calculus very challenging. The idea of thinking in terms of limits and convergence, what happens when intervals become arbitrarily small, is not something that you can say "comes naturally". Also, when you consider that many people never properly understood high-school algebra... It doesn't take a CS degree to understand it: in fact the beauty of the declarative approach, as Mike Kay just pointed out in another thread, is that it takes so much of the "nonsense" of programming the machine off the table (not nonsense to the machine, to be sure, but oh what a bore), by letting the implementor of the engine take care of it so the stylesheet writer doesn't have to think about it. I fear that your statements are hovering dangerously close to the tautological: "XSLT comes 'naturally' to the subset of people to whom it comes naturally. It does not come naturally to the subset of people to whom it does not come 'naturally'...." take the time to come to grips with what's different If you have to take the time to "come to grips" with something, then it doesn't "come naturally". about it, and what makes it so powerful and effective at doing what it does well. Perhaps, in the day of Perl and Javascript hacking, when people so often shortcut their learning in order to get something rigged up and out the door (i.e. there's a lot of pound-foolishness to go with all the penny-wisdom), this is a larger subset than one would like ... but it is by no means true that everyone finds XSLT difficult. I never stated that "everyone" finds XSLT difficult. Though I was writing advocacy material, I nonetheless chose my words carefully. I like to state things that I consider to be true. I was careful to say that the FreeMarker template language would "probably" come "more naturally" to "most people". I have little doubt that this is true. I have witnessed more than one "non-programmer" jump out of their chairs with excitement on discovering how "easy" XSLT is.... That somebody is discovering how easy XSLT is means that they had a preconceived idea that XSLT was quite difficult. IOW, I sense a tacit admission of the fact that XSLT has a reputation for being difficult. This leads to the question of why XSLT has such a reputation. How did it get such a "bum rap"? OTOH, such preconceived ideas, even obnoxious stereotypes, typically have at least some basis in the truth. If XSLT has a reputation for being difficult, I doubt that this is just a calumny invented out of whole cloth. My belief is that there could well be interest in an easier alternative to XSLT -- an alternative that is at least easier for the subset (however small or large) of people who find XSLT difficult. (You do yourself recognize the existence of this subset of people.) If I were in an IT department or company that hired various web page design types, and we needed technology for transforming XML, I have to say that I would guffaw at the idea of trying to train typical web design people to use XSLT. I would suspect that there are very mixed experiences out there in this regard. An alternative that could be easier for people to learn might well be attractive to people. Best Regards, Jonathan Revusky -- lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/ Transform XML with FreeMarker, http://freemarker.org/docs/xgui.html
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list 
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