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https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/et-tu-xml-the-downfall-of-the-relational-empire-abstract https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/et-tu-xml-t

• lioeters 4y ago
  From the above linked article, Et tu, XML? > XML is Lisp’s bastard nephew, with uglier syntax and no semantics. Yet it is poised to enable the creation of a web of data that dwarfs anything since the Library at Alexandria. From A Brief Defense of XML: > ..Despite its roots in SGML (the Common Lisp of markup languages), the creators advertised it as a general format to exchange any digital information. From The Nature of Lisp: https://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html https://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html > All this effectively means that we can use XML for generic storage of source code. We'd be able to create a whole class of programming languages that use uniform syntax, as well as write transformers that convert existing source code to XML. If we were to actually adopt this idea, compilers for different languages wouldn't need to implement parsers for their specific grammars - they'd simply use an XML parser to turn XML directly into an abstract syntax tree. > ..Everything we've learned about Lisp so far can be summarized by a single statement: Lisp is executable XML with a friendlier syntax.