18 May
2004
18 May
'04
10:26 a.m.
On Mon, 2004-05-17 at 17:04, Steve Harris wrote:
On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 02:55:16 -0400, Dave Robillard
wrote:
We don't have a scripting language problem, we have a metadata problem.
Square peg, round hole.
- Steve
This is where, if I was actually a LISP-ish language advocate, would go
on some silly rant about code being data or somesuch.
Buuuut I was joking really. XML was designed specifically for this sort
of thing, scheme was not. As nice and elegant as scheme is, more people
are more comfortable with XML-ey things than LISP-ey things (mostly due
to HTML.. every idiot has done some HTML, but functional programming
languages are more in the domain of us academic weenies and thus more
exclusive).
I think easing the burden on (potential) developers is pretty high up on
the priority list. Plus, we just don't need the power of scheme; and as
people have already mentioned, libxml2 is used damn near everywhere
anyway, so might as well use it. (Guile is, unfortunately, not even
remotely as commonly used..)
So, ++xml, because reinventing the wheel is stupid. While I understand
the kneejerk anti-xml reaction (damn buzzwords) it just seems like the
right tool for the job...
-Dave Robillard
ISTR
someone at LADconf 2 also proposed to use LISP for configuration
and I kind of liked the idea.
How about scheme?
Hey, it's the official scripting language of the GNU system.. :)