XML Is The Future

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[JuusoAlasuutari]

It's well known that Rust is just syntactic sugar on top of XML.

[jamesm]

engineers are built to solve problems, so we are creating our own problems

[FizzlNet]

Ah, and NoSQL. I had just learned it. In a new project, I somehow thought the client precisely wanted to use NoSQL. So I designed the backend around that without actually udnerstanding the implications. It was fun to implement while learning all this new cool tech. It wasn't really fun after 3 years when the data ended up looking like relational database anyway and half my code was just trying to keep the data consistent with tools precisely designed not to do that job.

[jessejayphotography]

Article perfectly encapsulated the web dev community. It appears they are all converging on the core concepts the Erlang team did with OTP decades ago.

[tipeon]

I've been in this industry for 20 years. I've seen the ebb and flow of many hype trains.
The only two pieces of tech that grew steadily the whole time are Linux and PostgreSQL.
If I had to bet my career, I would bet on those two.

[throwaway]

XML DTD is absolutely amazing. It allows really easy firewall bypasses and DoS attacks for simple misconfigurations of standard libraries. When I work as a developer (and not a penetration) tester, however, I avoid it like the plague.

[robertholtz]

I’ve been a developer for over 35 years. Everything you said is absolutely 100% true. These years wandering aimlessly through countless fads and frameworks was brutal to live through. It’s gratifying to know there is someone else out there who shares my pain. Thank you for passing on your knowledge and perspective. Bravo! 👏

[vicca]

This article speaks to my soul. Web dev has been a continuous escalation of unnecessary complexity.

[andybrice]

XML is definitely the best when your data resembles hypertext. I don't know why we keep inventing new HTML templating languages when we could've just been using XML syntax. The <ns:tag /> name-spacing syntax is particularly useful.

For data with a simpler "lists and maps" structure though, JSON is the better choice.

[nobyra]

Been following for a little bit and have to say, really liking it, funny and great insights. As someone who had no direction and still trying to find my path, your videos are a breath of fresh air. He has form, function and let's be honest, looks good doing it. Thank you brother and God bless you.

[Trezker]

"Oh hell no" My instant reaction.

[patrikfagard]

XML was a breath of fresh air during the Flash days as doing data io through url encoded strings was a nightmare. However, with time, it became clear that XML too was a pain to use and over-kill for just passing data to and from a server. It's only real benefit for this use-case was that it used utf-8, solving the code page issue. I looked into SOAP and ran away because at its core, it was still XML. Then I looked at JSON and it was simple, elegant and exactly what I needed. However, I ended up having to code my own actionscript parser for it because the only other way to parse a JSON file in Flash was through the eval() command; And that didn't seem like a good idea even for a technology that was mostly known for its security vulnerabilities.


Shortly after, Steve Jobs decided to turn his back on Flash and Adobe in pure incompetence learnt nothing from the criticism it was getting and decided to just let it die rather than fix its inherent problems. So I returned to the javascript world and was left scratching my head: Ecmascript 4 had been a thing. How had the javascript world completely passed up on this opportunity?


Flash had already figured out that actrionscript 1/vanilla javascript wasn't fit for purpose for anything more than 50 lines of code. Actionscript 2 had also proven that simply adding types to a pseudo language to then transpile it back to vanilla was a mistake. So why do we still have TypeScript that is doing exactly the same thing? Actionscript 3/ES4 proved that a first class typed language was the way to go for any serious front end web development.


To make matters worse, the original HTML specs left the door open for other languages to be used in the front end. Instead, HTML5 simply closed that door and stated its JS or nothing. The result has been a very slow and messy implementation of something that kind of resembles ES4, but because of backwards compatibility, will never be great. Building entire eco systems on top vanilla javascript has resulted in an elaborate house of cards that needs ever more complicated fixes to keep it from crashing down. But every new fix introduces just more wobble to the whole thing.

I guess web assembly is the future!

[leastmachine]

I don't know anything about software engineering, I'm just here for the secondhand adderall addict experience.

[sharperguy]

Funny how this big realization happens right as the federal reserve tightens interest rates. Almost as if the industry was just operating under the principle of "we have to spend this years budget to make sure we can ask for a bigger budget next year"

[NdxtremePro]

"..atom the first hackable editor."
Emacs enters the chat.

[jpegjpg]

Prime is a zoomer, never had to do SOAP. The pain, the envelops, the promises of "it should just work" and it never did.

[macctosh]

nice summarization of the modern web dev world. I haven't laughed this hard in days!!

[bro-rubro]

i'm just getting started with coding and 90% of the things you say i don't understand
i love it, i already feel like a professional

[vinterskugge]

When you need to precisely specify the structure of the data you are delivering, XML Schema makes XML the superior format.
I deliver data to a government agency, where they have a 70 KB XSD that defines everything. Works very well. There's no culture for something like that with JSON, even though JSON schema exists.

SOAP is still bad, though, and REST APIs with JSON are better than XML for simple use cases.

[TECHN]

I kinda want to just go back to C instead of dealing with all the crap we deal with today.