Do We Love XSLT Because It Is Difficult To Learn?

M. David (on his XSLTBlog) asks why some of us are drawn to XSLT and has a great quote (well sort of quote) from Tim Bray from a late night drinking session at XMLDevCon:

to understand XSLT you must first reach up with both hands and grab the two halves of your brain peeling each back until you have successfully turned your brain completely inside out

M. David thinks that it is just because XSLT is hard to learn, and we love to torture ourselves.  Me, well I think that some of us realize (in the deep dark recesses of our brains) that procedural programming (aka what most people call programming) is preventing us from reaching out full potential and that some form of declarative programming is the future.  XSLT reminds us that there is more then just procedural programming out there, and we really have to stop and open our minds to other forms of programming.  I think that once we get beyond the coding everything procedurally mentality, we will finally be able to develop systems that actually learn, and are not just programmed (Domain Specific Langauges  hint at just the beginning of our trip down that path).


The preceding blog entry has been syndicated from the DonXML Demsak’s All Things Techie Blog.  Please post all comments on the original post. 

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