4 ms·
> It's generally speaking part of the problem with the entire "XML as a savior" mindset of that earlier era and a big reason of why we left them Generally spea
by diggan 1y ago
> It's generally speaking part of the problem with the entire "XML as a savior" mindset of that earlier era and a big reason of why we left them
Generally speaking I feel like this is true for a lot of stuff in programming circles, XML included.
New technology appears, some people play around with it. Others come up with using it for something else. Give it some time, and eventually people start putting it everywhere. Soon "X is not for Y" blogposts appear, and usage finally starts to decrease as people rediscover "use the right tool for the right problem". Wait yet some more time, and a new technology appears, and the same cycle begins again.
Seen it with so many things by now that I think "we'll" (the software community) forever be stuck in this cycle and the only way to win is to explicitly jump out of the cycle and watch it from afar, pick up the pieces that actually make sense to continue using and ignore the rest.
- colonwqbang 1y agoThere have been many such cycles, but the XML hysteria of the 00s is the worst I can think of. It lasted a long time and the square peg XML was shoved into so many round holes.
- 0x445442 1y agoIDK, the XML hysteria is similar by comparison to the dynamic and functional languages hysterias. And it pales in comparison to the micro services, SPA and the current AI hysterias.
- xorcist 1y agoAgreed. Also, Docker.
- homebrewer 1y agoIMHO it's pretty comparable, the difference is only in the magnitude of insanity. After all, the industry did crap out these hardware XML accelerators that were supposed to improve performance of doing massive amounts of XML transformations — is it not the GPU/TPU craze of today? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_appliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_appliance E.g. https://www.serverwatch.com/hardware/power-up-xml-data-processing-with-the-datapower-xa35-xml-accelerator/ https://www.serverwatch.com/hardware/power-up-xml-data-proce...
- soulofmischief 1y agoAt least arrays of numbers are naturally much closer to the hardware, we've definitely come a long way in that regard.
- bogeholm 1y agoFrom your first link > An XML appliance is a special-purpose network device used to secure, manage and mediate XML traffic. Holy moly
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoExactly. Compared to microservices XML is a pretty minor problem.
- colejohnson66 1y agoA controversial opinion, but JSON is that too. Not as bad as XML was (̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶'̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶"̶J̶S̶L̶T̶"̶)̶, but wasting cycles to manifest structured data in an unstructured textual format has massive overhead on the source and destination sides. It only took off because "JavaScript everywhere" was taking off — performance be damned. Protobufs and other binary formats already existed, but JSON was appealing because it's easily inspectable (it's plaintext) and easy to use — `JSON.stringify` and `JSON.parse` were already there. We eventually said, "what if we made databases based on JSON" and then came MongoDB. Worse performance than a relational database, but who cares! It's JSON! People have mostly moved away from document databases, but that's because they realized it was a bad idea for the majority of usecases.
- ako 1y agoThere is JSLT: https://github.com/schibsted/jslt https://github.com/schibsted/jslt and it can be useful if you need to transform a json document into another json structure.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nolok 1y agoThe people who made that are either very funny in a sarcastic, way or in severe lack of a history lesson of the area they're working in.
- ako 1y agoWhat is a better alternative if you just need to transform JSON from one structure to another JSON structure?
- asa400 1y agoLoad it into a full programming language runtime and use the great collections libraries available in almost all languages to transform it and then serialize it into your target format. I want to use maps and vectors and real integers and functions and date libraries and spec libraries. String to string processing is hell.