December 13, 2004

Follow-up from Tim Bray on xml-dev

The answer from Tim in regards to my earlier post came after a pretty funny post to xml-dev from Michael Champion:

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On Thu, 2 Dec 2004 17:52:17 -0000, Michael Kay wrote:
> >
> > Developers who prefer XSLT to
> > C#/Java/Perl/PHP/Python/Javascript are in the minority and at
> > best are a niche market.
>
> Developers are a niche market.

http://www.xsltblog.com/archives/2004/12/could_it_be_tha.html may be
the last word on this topic: :-)

"Tim Bray declared that 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 ...Are we all masochists???!!!" "

I'm pretty sure that masochists are a niche within a niche market,

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:) I'm pretty sure they are too :)

In follow-up Tim Bray posted:

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That's amusing but I don't *think* I said it.... mind you, we stayed up pretty late. I seem to recall saying something along the lines of a long-time procedural-language guy like me having to invert the brain to use XSLT effectively... -Tim

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:) It was definitely the end of a very long travel day so its safe to assume that the exact details of the comment were forgotten by both of us just as quickly as they were made. None-the-less, whatever the details as to the specifics I found myself laughing for days after Tim had made this comment. While the exact details are missing the general idea is still there... actually I think it was more of the hand gestures and the look on Tim's face when he said it that had me rolling in the aisles. Definitely a missed Kodak moment :) Good times, good times... ;)

Actually, in wake of the "not-my-top-20-list" post from last week I'm just glad to see that this didn't spawn a similar "not-my-comment" post ;) Thanks for the laugh Tim!