Pushing the envelope

Darren's take on Java, agile methods, cool open source stuff, interesting technologies and other random wanderings through the land of blog.
Updated: 26/01/2003; 11:48:59.
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  21 October 2002

Fighting talk

In the script group, the Perl subjects may be more capable than the others, because the Perl language appears more than others to attract especially capable people.

[Lutz Prechelt, An Empirical Comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl]

Ready flamethrowers... Fire!

Could this perhaps be that it takes a better than average developer to wield Perl in anger without hurting themselves or others? I have something of a love-hate relationship with Perl. Its power and flexibility is undeniable, its syntax questionable. I have this nagging fear that the more I learn, the greater its seductive attraction will become, simply because it allows you to get away with almost anything.

That's it. I'm not posting anymore on this (although I reserve the right to change my mind). There are more important things in life than 'my language is better than yours' catfights. Put your energy into writing code instead.


12:32:14 PM      comment []

Musing about Markup

With regard to Joe's recent post about the deficiences of XML, I have something of a counterpoint to offer. XML was invented as an attempt to unify and simplify data interchange between disparate systems. This had been attempted before, but the efforts never gained sufficient momentum to achieve general acceptance.

XML is a subset of SGML, which has been around for a number of years. SGML is also the language from which HTML is derived. SGML itself is very complex, as it includes all sorts of mechanisms for defining domain-specific dialects (such as HTML and XML). XML was released on the back of the general and massive uptake of HTML, and was similar enough to HTML to be explained as 'HTML that computers can understand'. Part of the reason for XML's success is the huge surge in popularity of the internet and its promise of global connectivity, part is due to its design. XML is simple and formal enough to be relatively easy to design parsers for, while being flexible enough to describe most types of data. Developers were also used to dealing with HTML style markup. This combination of factors probably accounts for XML's huge popularity. The biggest hurdle for any attempt to standardise on a data interchange format was always going to be garnering enough general support to make it the 'de facto' standard.

There is always more than one way to do things, and XML may not be the prettiest or the best, but the details of its design are probably less important than the fact that it succeeded in its goal of achieving a standard means of describing data that was easy to pass around between otherwise incompatible systems. Now that we have come to expect easy data exchange, we are free to explore improvements, but we wouldn't be in this happy position were it not for XML.


12:00:34 PM      comment []

Self referential meta blogging

Skimming over some of my old posts, I can tend to spot which ones were written from home and which ones from work (it helps that I also remember writing them!). Generally speaking, the more 'off-topic' and emotive posts tended to be written from home. It seems that being at work causes me to put on my 'professional' hat, while at home I'm more likely to just bash out whatever's on my mind at the time. Interesting.

11:35:14 AM      comment []

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