The idea behind XSLT (match/patch) is amazing. Xslt itself is complete trash. - developing an entirely new language in XML was a meh idea, but it was severely

The idea behind XSLT (match/patch) is amazing. Xslt itself is complete trash. - developing an entirely new language in XML was a meh idea, but it was severely lacking making using it difficult unless you were allowed to extend it via custom functions and elements - the template-as-transform and template-as-function confusion was completely unnecessary and made it much harder to learn and grok than necessary - but the worst mistake by far was the impliciteness and confusion of `.`, the thing is verbose as all hell, the implicit passing and transformation of the context was completely unwarranted, not unlike Perl’s magical side-effect unless you’re deep in the sauce it makes the entire thing a lot worse, and with even less payout given the general verbosity of XSLT and XML (in perl all the magic provides amazingly terse CLI commands, it’s just a shame people then used that in perl files)