A recent interview with Sun senior IT architect Victoria Livschitz has raised a bit of controversy over her negative remarks about XML and Web services, which I quote here:
The world has gone crazy with XML and then web services; SOAP and UDDI are getting enormous attention, and, yet, from a software engineering standpoint, they seem to me a setback rather then a step forward. We now have a generation of young programmers who think of software in terms of angle brackets. An enormous mess of XML documents that are now being created by enterprises at an alarming rate will be haunting our industry for decades. With all that excitement, no one seems to have the slightest interest in basic computer science.
I posted the following feedback to the article:
The comments expressed seem simplistic and vague. For example:
I envision a programming language that is a notch richer then OO. It would be based on a small number of primitive concepts, intuitively obvious to any mature human being, and tied to well-understood metaphors, such as objects, conditions, and processes. I hope to preserve many features of the object-oriented systems that made them so safe and convenient, such as abstract typing, polymorphism, encapsulation and so on. The work so far has been promising.
Who hasn't envisioned an intuitive programming language? The problem is, you can't make a language that intuitive, general purpose, and yet formally rigorous. I'd love to know more about the "work" being referred to.
Also, I can't believe that the discussion regarding expressing processes did not turn to process calculi like pi, or at least business process definition languages like BPEL. These are the languages treating processes as first class entities.
Nor did the conversation touch on any of the other proposed "new approaches" such as AOP, SOA, Model-Oriented Architecture, domain-specific languages, etc.
When the one approach that many people find much more intuitive presents itself, XML Web services, Livschitz mistakes its explosive popularity for a problem! The reason for the explosion is that it is the more intuitive "language" that Livschitz is looking for.
I'd like to understand better how Livschitz believes XML Web Services is a step backwards "from a software engineering" standpoint. Or how it leads to people lacking "interest in basic computer science." If anything, the exact opposite is true, XML Web services is helping bring about better software engineering, because more loosely coupled, and is opening up new vistas in computer science.
9:40:45 AM 
