

The Perils of Partially Powered Languages - jashkenas
http://www.yesodweb.com/blog/2011/08/perils-partially-powered-languages

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andrewflnr
This reminds me of something Steve Yegge said.

"I know, I know — everyone raves about the power of separating your code and
your data. That's because they're using languages that simply can't do a good
job of representing data as code. But it's what you really want, or all the
creepy half-languages wouldn't all evolve towards being Turing-complete, would
they?"

<http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-emacs-problem>

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mstepniowski
I've worked on a very similar project for WolneLektury.pl, but were
fortunately allowed to use Python instead of Java.

XSLT and XPath proved to be tremendously useful, cutting development time at
least in half. Thanks to the wonderful lxml library I could easily extend XSLT
with any functionality I wanted. Of course I've kept the single best future of
this domain language intact - its declarative nature.

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dgreensp
Mixed messages here. His biggest target of criticism is his own Frankenstein's
monster of a Java project, but he wants the blame to go to the tools
(technologies), and the fact that he wasn't allowed to use Haskell.

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exDM69
You seem to have missed the point. The problem he points out is that in the
Java world, it is popular to use a domain specific language like XSLT to
handle some tasks and that's an external tool that does not nicely embed into
Java. In the Haskell world, domain specific languages are also popular but
they tend to be embedded in Haskell, which makes it easier to do the non-
domain-specific stuff (like writing the results of the XML transformation to a
file). In Java land, many tools can be extended through plugins which can get
the same effect but the result is not as easy to follow.

He also has some critisism towards Java the language, but it played a lesser
role in the article. Some of the targets of his critique (like the lack of sum
types in Java) are also reasons why Java does not have cool embedded domain
specific languages like Haskell has.

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justincormack
Though xslt didnt come out of Java, it comes from the w3c mindset of how
things should be done. His main criticism is the poor Java XML library,
combined with the weakness of xslt, so neither work. Now we all know that most
DOM style interfaces are badly designed, tend to think the answer is the
Haskell one is an exception.

Everyone else just avoids xml for these types of reason... Obviously you cant
for this problem.

