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XML is the future

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Re: XML is the future

#151

Post by yarg »

MawKKe wrote: post #147
yarg wrote: post #141

XML has been around for long enough that a lot of people have developed a tacit understanding of it, it's not reasonable in all cases (I once went to war with an 8000 line build.xml file - fuck everything about that), but for simple cases it's an easy to parse hierarchical format that most people who need to can get a handle on. But there's one vestigial artefact that irks me. Why can't I just do this? Validation and…

why not go further, why can't we just write > although now that ="foo" business seems too noisy. how about > also, those angle brackets are too pointy, let's swap them to something more pleasant (tree (leaf :colour green) (leaf :colour yellow))

The change I suggested is backwards compatible - probably a relatively small change to a single method in parsing.

You, on the other hand, took the pre-existing syntax and contemptuously threw it out the window - and completely ignored the advantage of widespread tacit understanding.

Re: XML is the future

#152

Post by tuyiown »

> But above all, I learned that geeks think they are rational beings, while they are completely influenced by buzz, marketing, and their emotions. Even more so than the average person, because they believe they are less susceptible to it than normies, so they have a blind spot.

This is so spot on, so much that 9 hours after publication, it looks like I'm the first that I'm picking on it to start a thread. The author has written the essay to illustrate that point, what I see is strong denial from commenters.

Re: XML is the future

#153

Post by boffinAudio »

gnulinux wrote: post #7

I've been working in the tech industry in the US for about 5 years. Ever since I knew myself I've been coding. From middle school to high school, given any problem, like Sudoku, or keeping up daily chores, my solution was Programming! Programming wasy homebase. Then I studied it in uni, thought I was kinda good at it, and loved it. But when I started working in the industry, I realized that it's absolutely exhausting…

Use what works. Ship code. Support your customers. Help them improve their lives.

All other considerations are secondary. Including whether or not your peers approve of your code.

Always remember: the User is king. Programmers are nothing without users, no matter what technology they apply to the situation.

Sounds like you've shipped, and shipped often. GOOD!

Re: XML is the future

#154

Post by yarg »

tomgp wrote: post #144
yarg wrote: post #141

XML has been around for long enough that a lot of people have developed a tacit understanding of it, it's not reasonable in all cases (I once went to war with an 8000 line build.xml file - fuck everything about that), but for simple cases it's an easy to parse hierarchical format that most people who need to can get a handle on. But there's one vestigial artefact that irks me. Why can't I just do this? Validation and…

I’m not sure, but possible legibility? Like if you have a bunch of nested nodes it’s nice to be able to see where one ends at a glance.

Decent indenting generally helps there (and siblings are often of the same type anyway, in which case it doesn't improve indistinguishability).

Beyond that syntax highlighting and marcation of the head and tail of the currently selected tree can improve things when you're manually editing a document.

Re: XML is the future

#155

Post by steve_adams_86 »

I absolutely get the sentiment about things breaking every 2 months and how hype dominated where cool heads should have prevailed… Yet these tools allowed me to build great things over the last ten years. Only two projects I started professionally were never finished, and one was only because my son was born and I decided to be a stay at home parent. I don’t have this problem of unspeakable dead projects.

For all of the warts, this crazy ecosystem has been a productivity power house for my employers. React native is absolutely awful to build things with, but it worked. Unified code from server to web client to mobile client actually worked, and it worked well. That’s crazy.

So on one hand I get it. On the other, I feel like we’ve forgotten how much better things have gotten. Building for the web is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was, but it took a lot to get here. Yeah there are still issues and no XML wasn’t the future, but I think it was worth it.

I’m probably lucky too though, because I accidentally picked technologies with relatively good staying power. I never did the Angular 2 rewrite, for example. I was deep in React and redux and stayed there for years. I can see this being a lot worse if you didn’t get to transfer as many skills over the years.

Re: XML is the future

#157

Post by JBiserkov »

gnulinux wrote: post #7

I've been working in the tech industry in the US for about 5 years. Ever since I knew myself I've been coding. From middle school to high school, given any problem, like Sudoku, or keeping up daily chores, my solution was Programming! Programming wasy homebase. Then I studied it in uni, thought I was kinda good at it, and loved it. But when I started working in the industry, I realized that it's absolutely exhausting…

> But it feels like I'm stuck in a Franz Kafka novel.

Director of O(o)ps: Funny that you should mention that...

Re: XML is the future

#159

Post by JBiserkov »

JBiserkov wrote: post #157
gnulinux wrote: post #7

I've been working in the tech industry in the US for about 5 years. Ever since I knew myself I've been coding. From middle school to high school, given any problem, like Sudoku, or keeping up daily chores, my solution was Programming! Programming wasy homebase. Then I studied it in uni, thought I was kinda good at it, and loved it. But when I started working in the industry, I realized that it's absolutely exhausting…

> But it feels like I'm stuck in a Franz Kafka novel. Director of O(o)ps: Funny that you should mention that...

https://kafka.apache.org/

Re: XML is the future

#160

Post by CraigJPerry »

coldtea wrote: post #149
andrewflnr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would phrase almost the same idea from the opposite angle: focus on the fundamentals that never change, and view the trends in terms of how they relate to those fundamentals. But also, those are some pretty odd comparisons. For sure Ansible and Terraform aren't directly comparable. If anything they're complementary. Terraform provisions machines (and also infra, etc), and Ansible configures provisioned machines.

> Terraform provisions machines (and also infra, etc), and Ansible configures provisioned machines. Each of such tools expands to take the role of the other (and also read email)...

Hmmm i feel like those tools naturally railroad you into a certain split of responsibilities.

Sure - you could use tf’s local/remote-exec to do the stuff you’d normally do with ansible but man that would be annoying and slow going when you know you can reach for ansible.

Vice versa, you could have an ansible playbook to call the cloud provider’s api and cook up some kind of approval workflow / state management but man that would be annoying and slow going when you know you can reach for terraform.

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