I am one. But I do a lot of work with XML documents (not just data in XML form, but documents marked up in XML). XSLT is an invaluable tool for this problem dom

I am one. But I do a lot of work with XML documents (not just data in XML form, but documents marked up in XML). XSLT is an invaluable tool for this problem domain, but it's a relatively small niche. I can easily imagine programmers getting frustrated with it if they aren't using it for its intended purpose, or even if they haven't yet grokked how it's supposed to work. It's probably not quite a functional language by most definitions, but it has a lot of features common to functional languages, including immutable variables, no side effects, XSLT 2.0 does have first class functions, recursion, etc. The Saxon implementation of XSLT 2.0 even has lazy sequences (I'm not sure if that's a language thing, or just that implementation). Without knowing what the OP is having to deal with, I can't really evaluate his complaint. I've certainly seen some hideous XSLT, but it doesn't have to be hideous, and it's great for the (pretty narrow) domain it was intended for. You can abuse any programming language—I don't think XSLT is particularly special in that regard.