4 ms·
Martin Odersky once mentioned that he added XML literal to Scala because it was 2000s (citation needed). Although it's hard to refrain from ridiculing these, it
by flakiness 5y ago
Martin Odersky once mentioned that he added XML literal to Scala because it was 2000s (citation needed). Although it's hard to refrain from ridiculing these, it's probably not fair to do it. 2000s had its own collective craziness and this was one of them. We'll have such ones for 2020s but we can only spot it years later.
(Don't name it to show your smartness. Pointing a few is not hard, but pinpointing all is not possible unless you're a pure naysayer.)
- jchw 5y agoSome things were bad ideas but we never really figured out why they were actually bad. It’s easy to incredulously state “of course it’s bad because X” but it takes some deep analysis to really get closer to the core of things. Sometimes the results are not what you would’ve expected at all. Sometimes it feels obvious in retrospect. And then some ideas are actually great, but the execution of the idea was poor. This can really make it seem like the idea itself is bad or impractical even though it’s not. Personally, I liked E4X. Its probably better off gone, but I think the idea wasn’t so awful. It sounds bad in retrospect, but I used it and it was far from the worst way to interact with XML.
- MaxBarraclough 5y agoI'm out of the loop on this one - does Odersky regret it because JSON has largely supplanted XML, or does he regret it because it's not the sort of problem that is best solved with a language feature?
- esarbe 5y agoBecause it unnecessarily complicates the grammar and because there are better ways to accomplish the same thing.