From: JamesBritt <james@...>
Date: 2002-12-19T06:39:30+09:00
Subject: Re: help -- persuade my boss to adopt ruby



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Austin Ziegler [mailto:austin@halostatue.ca]
> Sent: Monday, December 16, 2002 5:42 AM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: Re: help -- persuade my boss to adopt ruby
>
>
> On Mon, 16 Dec 2002 11:46:25 +0900, W. Kent Starr wrote:
> > XML may be a key enabling technology here. Another quote for your
> > collection, this one from Steve Litt (March 2001, Troubleshooting
> > Professional Magazine, Troubleshooters.com): "XML derives its
> > power from the fact that it can represent anything the human mind
> > can conceive."
> >
> > To the degree this observation is accurate, the potential is
> > mind-boggling. IMO opinion, within the specific domain of
> > programming, Ruby exhibits to a large degree these same
> > characteristics.
>
> I have to disagree with this quote about XML. First, I don't think
> that XML can represent anything the human mind can conceive -- it
> imposes a particular way of thinking when attempting to represent
> things which may not be conducive to representation of particular
> concepts. (XML is a hierarchical data format; not everything can be
> represented hierarchically.) XML also requires a lot of meta-data
> and alternate "languages" to indicate the links between data, which
> makes it very difficult to express the same information in multiple
> ways.

For what it's worth, XML, through the use of id and idref attributes, can
break out of strictly hierarchical formats.  Granted, though, that the more
intuitive nature of XML is to represent data as trees.

>
> The problem with a hierarchical data format is that it pretty much
> requires that your data be able to be represented as a hierarchy,
> and that enforces a single data query path (a la LDAP); you can't
> query efficiently in the opposite direction, or from the middle.

I'm not really sure how even the use of idrefs helps with, say, XPath
queries in arbitrary directions.  There are, though, XPath functions for
locating parents and siblings.

One is free to slurp the XML into whatever in-memory representation is
useful, and manipulate that object directly, forgetting that the data source
was ever XML.  (Computer memory is sequential, yet developers don't feel
that all data types must be linear.  Interpretations are layered over the
physical data format.)  This decoupling from fixed data types is one of the
things I like best about XML; it's conceptually similar to dynamic typing in
Ruby.


Still, XML has been ultra-hyped (though often misunderstood) to the point it
makes my head spin, and that opening quote is a bit much.




James

>
> -austin
> -- Austin Ziegler, austin@halostatue.ca on 2002.12.16 at 07.37.02
>
>
>