I‘m currently working on yanking a bit of XSLT out and reimplementing it in procedural DOM code—currently as in I have spent the last month on this, and hope to

I‘m currently working on yanking a bit of XSLT out and reimplementing it in procedural DOM code—currently as in I have spent the last month on this, and hope to have it in a PR tomorrow. I share your stated preference for pure functions, and their accessibility to people who aren’t explicitly programmers, and I share your implied preference for declarative programming to achieve that. Unfortunately my specific use case needs at least to become more procedural before I can take it further, but I’ve at least structured the code so it’s adaptable to pure functions in the future. I really don’t think YAML and its own terse but ambiguous rules are better suited. The problem I’ve found in XSLT during this effort, and in YAML in the past, is there’s no debugging story that isn’t full of pain and mysterious grasping in the dark. I know actually functional languages like lisps do this better. I strongly suspect more declarative logic languages do better still. I also know from experience that the Excel interfaces most of our users interface are better than the XML experience, and I strongly suspect that’s closer to the pure/declarative + non-programming-accessible ideal than a markup language suited to other purposes.