In my previous company we had - back in the day - a newly hired junior developer that fully subscribed to that particular XML hype. We had our uses for XML - w

In my previous company we had - back in the day - a newly hired junior developer that fully subscribed to that particular XML hype. We had our uses for XML - we liked it especially for API endpoints and import/export files we exchanged with third party companies. Reason being, you could create a Schema Definition, send it to the other company, and tell them not to bother you, until their data validated against that XSD. We used XML for stuff like that extensively. But that one junior was like "You are using databases? How silly of you! Just use an XML file and x-path. There's nothing a database can do, that XML can't! You really should switch over your production frontend to xml immediately!" We gave him a little side project and allowed him to write that using xml instead of a database, which he did. When his results turned out to be pretty much unusable, and did not convince us to switch everything to xml, he left the company to find a more "modern" workplace... To this day I'm not sure if he actually truly believed that xml/xpath would soon replace all databases - or if he just didn't want to learn SQL (and hide the fact that he was pretty bad at it).