Many, many years ago, a new specification called "XML" emerged. After a bit, people realized it was kinda useful for some stuff.
Then, something happened.
MANAGERS!
I imagine many conversations between managers / developers somewhat like this:
M: "So, what is the nice thing with #XML
D: "oh, it is a specification that simplifies stuff, since tools have a clean format to work with."
M: "So, what kinda specifications?"
D: "Oh, it can be more or less anything."
M: *starry eyed!* "an.. an... anything?"
I was teaching computer courses for companies at that point. Suddenly, my calendar was just packed with XML courses.
It is like very limited what you can teach, it is not really complex, so you talk surrounding technologies. But not...
"Our boss wants us to replace the SQL db with XML?"
"what?"
"We gonna use XML instead of MS SQL"
"... what?"
"He said XML can be used for anything..."
If you think companies with #AI plans have actual plans, with a strategy make sense, please think of this story.
Oki, this ended up with more reach than I ever expected.
Heck, I must have touched on something relatable.
And as this reached further than I expected, just wanted to underline a few things.
I am in no way comparing XML to AI, it is to underline the issue when people making decisions do not understand the technology. I am no AI expert, and as such, I don't want to make any decisions in regards to using AI other than those that can be made with the small scope I get. Managers with far less understanding than me, make big decisions, often based on input from companies that benefit from these decisions.
Given the potential AI has, this is vastly more concerning than a bad XML decision. These decisions can ruin a lot more than "replace our database with XML!" ever could, for far more people.
Also, I am not against XML, as a dev, I use it for stuff even now.
Nor am I against AI, but it must be ethical and consequences well understood.
Now, managers are running too fast, copyrights are violated, etc.
@lettosprey the fun thing is that MS SQL Server can output results in XML and afaik this is why it's part of our bespoke CMS' PHP/XML and client-side XSLT pipeline that's been going on for ages
@arakin And things like XML output from services can make perfect sense.
That a specification could somehow suddenly replace most of the services, not so much :O
@lettosprey @arakin One thing I hate about "IT" and "Dev" etc is that there's no prof organization part to it, there's no unions, there's no required CE, etc.
Job titles / roles are so meaningless and barely translate between orgs.
Folks can learn a thing in school and they're off to fend for themselves for the rest of their lives - be it keep up w/times and learn more or do nothing & become a dino, or try to adapt every buzzword/trend into everything.
All we have are vendor-specific certs :/
@colinstu @lettosprey @arakin Depending on where you live, there are professional organisations you can join.
I have on occasion needed to hint to clients/employers that if they were really asking me to do [whatever it was] then sorry but I wouldn't be able to because it would breach the professional code of conduct I'd signed up to.
MBCS, CEng, Eur Ing
@arakin @lettosprey I used to work at a place where we had massive strings of XML crammed into the MySQL database...
@lettosprey
It's OK, we've got JSON now.
Oh, JSON column data format? We're fscked.
@M0KHR At least, we still have a relational database to query.
We are not replacing mysql with json :O
@M0KHR @lettosprey JSON columns are actually very good.
For storing JSON.
Which you sometimes may want to do!
And sometimes it's a good idea!
Postgres also does it very efficiently and can even index the hell out of it!
Sure, it's not normal, but as long as we don't make non-normal the new normal...
@M0KHR @lettosprey We got JSON Schema, aka, reinventing XML but with worse syntax and less standardization. Go team!
@lettosprey I remember those times. You need IIS & sql talking to each other, new clunky syntax, clunky xml client parsers and an imaginary situation where you'd exchange data between organizations & if you didn't cross org boundaries, you were supposed to use less painful pre-xml data structures.
Many years ago my boss saw the "RSS" button everywhere, so he ask me to add it.
When it was done, he looks at it and ask me to change the design of the page xD
@lettosprey tale as old as time
@lettosprey I have to deal with XML data columns in SQL Server daily because when Microsoft was advising my company a couple of decades ago before I worked there, they were pushing XML columns as the wonder solution to everything.
@lettosprey You make fun but the founders of the company I’m at now took this exact decision (in 2007) and we’re still paying the cost decades later. Apparently they’d been burned by Oracle at their previous company
@lettosprey @cstross Yes—I had to do exactly that in the late 2000s! For several years, our freelancer team created Flash microsites for Landrover’s annual Live Rallye, crunching daily images, videos, and diary entries transmitted per satellite from the Malaysian jungle and similar. And during my very first call with Landrover’s UK IT department, I was told that, for security reasons, we couldn’t use a data base! That’s how I came to create an #XML backend as a stand-in for SQL.
Fun times!
@lettosprey it also took a minute for people to figure out what is was actually good for, and fit it into their regular toolkit, like all the other specs...
Funny to read this now while I'm working on an XML schema for database queries in one system I'm developing (to be translated into SQL down the line).
@lettosprey I found myself saying exactly this to some colleagues at an ‘AI’ event a couple of weeks ago.
@lettosprey "XML
@lettosprey my _favorite_ xml documents were real estate documents for distribution that included a single field: unstructured `csv` rows.
@lettosprey thinking back on all the times the CIO read the latest issue of CIO magazine and then demanded the tech stack of the month...
@lettosprey that’s a pretty interesting perspective on the quality we can expect from AI.
To this day, the xslt libraries for Java (the most widespread enterprise language) only work partially. While you can solve most problems with time, better avoid trusting the documentation, if you need to change XML directly.
@ArneBab @lettosprey I had to fight with xslt, what a nightmare
@avirr @ArneBab @lettosprey i had to support a system written by a senior IT academic for their faculty that used XML files to store the data, and xslt to translate it into HTML on demand. I still wake up screaming. (Guess which language it was in)
@aeduna what helped me when I had to fight with xslt the third time (or so, transforming geo XML stuff) was to think of it as a very verbose, very inconsistent lisp.
It didn’t make the actual work easier, but it felt better.
“See how much nicer this could be if it were a lisp”
Also it’s then much easier to picture the transformations.
@avirr @lettosprey
@kephalos I actually already used sxml->xml
https://dthompson.us/posts/rendering-html-with-sxml-and-gnu-guile.html
But not at work, only for hobby projects. Works pretty well.
@aeduna @avirr @lettosprey
@lettosprey It felt like this already, thank you for the anecdote.
I did comparemthe corporate push to the idea of doing everything in Excel already, but I’ve not seen this with my own eyes.
@lettosprey remember the old saying .. XML is like violence .. if it doesn't solve your problem you aren't using enough of it ... also mostly true these days ...
XML is dead! JSON is the new XML. Orange is the new Black. Slavery is FREEDOM!!!!
@alexshendi „JSON es the new XML“ — yes, at least it’s used that way, and that’s a problem:
@lettosprey Another one to add to the Venn Diagram of *"Actually just a very slow database"*s...
@lettosprey I worked once on a presentation app that read it's data (categories, details) from an exported directory structure riddled with XML files to describe the contents. This was read before by an obsolete Flash app that did the same.
NONE of the XML files was good. It took several recursive regex operations on all the files to just fix the syntax, the encoding hell and some stupid corner cases, find duplicates and so on.
And all the time I wondered how the Flash app did the same before.
@bekopharm @lettosprey best article written about XML ever: https://cacm.acm.org/practice/xml-fever/
@nichtich @lettosprey haha that is wild
@nichtich Wow, I wasn't aware of this one but it's excellent! Thanks for sharing!
@nichtich @bekopharm @lettosprey can't wait for the follow up on RDF
@lettosprey I actually like XML (especially when compared to JSON and YAML), but your story is spot on.
@lettosprey At my last job I often gave feedback to job descriptions written by my former boss and it really gave me a bit of a grudge against XML.
Literally every job for data science or software had 'Experience in XML' as a prominent bulletpoint at equal importance to the actual programming languages the team used or actual subject-matter knowledge for the role. Every time, I gave her the feedback that that makes as much sense as treating CSVs as some major vital skill, but it kept showing up again and again.
It somehow having a kind-of fandom among managers explains so much.
@lettosprey this is exactly the attitude I would expect from someone who isn't alpha sigma black belt XML certified
@lettosprey my experience in the trenches (more or less word for word):
Boss: I read in CIO Magazine about this new thing called XML that's going to revolutionize the industry. I met with the Oracle reps and bought every XML tool they sell.
Devs: What's on the roadmap that requires XML?
Boss: I don't know, but we've spent almost a million dollars on them so you'd better use them.
------
Architect: This new app is going to be based on EJBs that produce XML which we'll convert to HTML through an XSLT transformation.
Me: Wouldn't it be more direct and less fragile to use a JSP?
Architect: Yes, but this way we get to put all of these technologies on our resumes.
@nakedambition @lettosprey oh wow. It this the time forme to tell you about "Water", an XML programming language back in the very early 00's?
When I learned about it at the time, it was just so stupid that I kept looking at it like you can't look away from a car crash. The people behind it were so certain this was the future.
The premise was that the biggest problem with programming languages was that they weren't XML-based. Apparently all your data is XML, so if the programming language is XML too, that would somehow make things, better?
To be fair, this isn't entirely unheard of, since Lisp stores data and code in the same way, and tge makers of Water clearly knew about Lisp since their language took a lot of ideas from it. However, Lisp data has something XML don't, which is a type system.
So what did they do? Well, they added a type system to XML of course. At no point did they consider that perhaps XML wasn't the best format for this stuff. Well, they did, but their solution was to promote something they called "concise xml" which was an abomination that included types, and had some syntax simplifications that has to be seen to be believed. Let's just say that the end result looked like someone took XML, ran it through a grinder and tried to write Lisp with it. My favourite syntax extension: you could put tags inside other tags.
All of this apparently had a one-to-one mapping with regular XML, because again, the biggest problem with web programming was supposedly that everything wasn't XML.
The people behind it was promoting it with the most self-certain attitude I've ever seen. They were so sure of themselves.
Eventually you stopped hearing anything about it, and information about the priject just seemed to disappear. It was kind of weird. I remember trying to figure out what happened, and I came across a news article that was reporting on the main guy being convicted of child molestation and sent to prison. That explains things I guess.
@loke @lettosprey I need to find out more about this! It sounds so obnoxiously typical of those days
@nakedambition @lettosprey I just looked it up, and oh... my... It's been revived: https://waterlang.org
But interestingly enough, there are no actual code examples (kind of obvious, if you knew what it looks like). The blog posts are also written by someone named "orlando", which may be an alias, perhaps by someone who don't want you to google their name.
Thankfully, archive.org provides some historical information. In particular, you may want to read the presentations of the designers where they comapre themselves with K&R as well as John Lennon: https://web.archive.org/web/20051026052339/http://waterlanguage.org/about.html
You can then go and search the name, and you'll find some interesting references, especially regarding how some child molestors change their names to not be as easy to look up.
@loke @lettosprey this is amazing. On one level it's like a Lisp with angle brackets instead of parentheses. But it's object oriented? And you really weren't kidding about the nested XML?!
@nakedambition @lettosprey It does sound like a joke, doesn't it?
@lettosprey about 2010 I worked for a supply chain company that had issues integrating data provided by multiple upstream suppliers
A consultant: "But they are switching to XML, so if they all give you XML and your system imports XML it will all just work"
Me: "...it doesn't work like that"
Them: "eh?"
1/2