Wendell Piez wrote:
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.
At 08:13 AM 6/25/2003, Jonathan Revusky wrote:
the underlying procedural logic will come more naturally to most people
than the declarative/functional programming model embodied by XSLT.
I've written and taught XSLT extensively, to a wide range of kinds of
audiences from hard-core developers to web-heads to professors and
graduate students of (natural) languages and literatures.
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 programming model embodied by XSLT is perfectly "natural" when it's
understood for what it is, and not confused with some other model.
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 submit that Jonathan's claim is true only for a subset of the
potential user base of XSLT -- namely those who can't or don't (for
whatever reason)
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
Regards,
Wendell
======================================================================
Wendell Piez
mailto:wapiez(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
======================================================================
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list