XSLT might have the greatest ratio of brilliance to marketing of anything in our industry. XSLT is a pattern matching DSL for converting trees into other trees

XSLT might have the greatest ratio of brilliance to marketing of anything in our industry. XSLT is a pattern matching DSL for converting trees into other trees. What things are trees? Programs. It is also XML. XML is a boring business thing for boring business people associated with legacy Java codebases. We like json here. Or maybe yaml. To quote an otherwise excellent past colleague, "the pointy brackets hurt my eyes". It's horrible to edit in notepad too. Who wants XML syntax for a purely functional programming language? No-one wants that, we write our compilers in C++ thank you. As a bonus extra, "XML schema" are a similarly crufty rubbish old thing in nasty XML syntax that look suspiciously like "type of that tree". So you can typecheck the intermediate IR in your compiler pipeline. If you wrote it in the bad language from the before times. Emacs knows what those schema mean too. The world has moved on to better marketed semantically worse things with prettier syntax. This brings me joy.