Problem with processing XML

[Paul Boddie]

On 23 Jan, 12:03, Stefan Behnel <stefan.behnel-n05... at web.de> wrote:
>
> I had a discussion with Java people lately and they were all for Ruby, Groovy
> and similar languages, "because they have curly braces and are easy to learn
> when you know Java".
>
> My take on that is: Python is easy to learn, full-stop.

Well, that may be so, but it's somewhat beside the point in question.

> It's the same for DOM: when you know DOM from (usually) the Java world, having
> a DOM-API in Python keeps you from having to learn too many new things. But
> when you get your nose kicked into ElementTree, having to learn new things
> will actually help you in understanding that what you knew before did not
> support your way of thinking.

I'm not disputing the benefits of the ElementTree approach, but one
has to recall that the DOM is probably the most widely used XML API
out there (being the one most client-side developers are using) and
together with the other standards (XPath and so on) isn't as bad as
most people like to make out. Furthermore, I don't think it does
Python much good to have people "acting all Ruby on Rails" and telling
people to throw out everything they ever did in order to suck up the
benefits, regardless of the magnitude of those benefits; it comes
across as saying that "your experience counts for nothing compared to
our superior skills". Not exactly the best way to keep people around.

As I noted in my chronology, the kind of attitude projected by various
people in the Python community at various times (and probably still
perpetuated in the Ruby community) is that stuff originating from the
W3C is bad like, for example, XSLT because "it's like Lisp but all in
XML (yuck!)", and yet for many tasks the most elegant solution is
actually XSLT because it's specifically designed for those very tasks.
Fortunately or unfortunately, XSLT didn't make it into the standard
library and thus isn't provided in a way which may or may not seem
broken but, like the DOM stuff, if the support for standardised/
recognised technologies is perceived as deficient, and given the point
above about glossing over what people themselves bring with them to
solve a particular problem, then people are quite likely to gloss over
Python than hear anyone's sermon about how great Python's other XML
technologies are.

> http://www.python.org/about/success/esr/
>
> So, there is a learning curve, but it's much shorter than what you already
> invested to learn 'the wrong thing'. It's what people on this list tend to
> call their "unlearning curve".

Well, maybe if someone helped the inquirer with his namespace problem
he'd be getting along quite nicely with his "unlearning curve".

Paul