Documentation

[Asher]

Yet here you are arguing about the relative merits of ****ing XML versus JSON.

So?

How is this any different than you arguing about the relative merits of one financial instrument versus another?

The fact is, nobody other than a tech person cares. The trick is to get yourself in a situation where you can figure out what non-tech people want (even if they don't know it yet) and then build it yourself/get somebody else to build it for you.

I'm hoping this is just some troll, because it's pretty weak.

The people you are referring to are what are called "product developers". They get paid a fraction of what I do.

But of course the software I design is done from the perspective of the user. The high-level overview of ALL of our new features start with what are called "stories": "User would like to be able to select an object on the board and effortlessly make infinitely many clones of the object to drag elsewhere on the board", for instance.

But from there it needs to be implemented. That's where the technical understanding comes in.

My best days are when I provide a service that makes the life of some total tech incompetent easier.

This is what my company does day in and day out.

I don't think you understand the mentality of the world outside of the investment banking industry. At my company, all of the big salaries go to the tech people. If I check on glassdoor, etc all of the non-tech people (Finance, Product Definition people, Services, etc) make a fraction of what we do. We drive the company -- we develop the new products, we think of the ideas.

We've had 40% y/y growth for 5 years in a row now, too. During this recession/downturn also.

[Asher]

The technical people also have a much more attractive stock options program than the rest of the company. Hardly bottom of the totem pole.

[Hauldren Collider]

Also considering that I'm an intern, the amount of freedom I've been given on this project is pretty awesome. I was told to create a form generator using XSLT and PHP from RelaxNG and the rest was up to me. I ended up writing my own ghetto CMS in the space of a few months so they can add a log viewer (which I wrote) and a few other stuff easily.

It's a pretty good website setup too, if I do say so myself

[KrazyHorse]

I watched this movie and thought of Asher: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control...ete_%28film%29

[Asher]

I would never have sex with a computer. It might damage it.

[Hauldren Collider]

To demonstrate the "when all you have is a hammer" crap about XML, I have an exercise for you asher.

Go to excel. Make a simple spreadsheet. Save as XML 2003. Save as CSV. Compare. Decide which you would rather do: Spend a few weeks with the XML, or parse the CSV in an hour and be done with it.

As for data interchange, may I humbly suggest LDIF or YAML? That is, if you refuse to just assume utf-8 for JSON.

[Asher]

You can't ever assume UTF-8. Ever. Evereverever. It is a never-ending source of frustration for me.

As for CSV/XLS/XML...what is your point? If all you're doing is saving simple values, CSV is sufficient. Just like JSON has many valid uses for simpler data interchange.

Frankly I prefer pipe-delimited files rather than CSV, because comma text values are pretty common.

XML and JSON are not in the same league. I'm not saying use XML for everything, just that it is very valuable in many cases where JSON is not a good fit. For instance, XML makes perfect sense for the new Office formats (docx, xlsx, pptx, etc) while I think you would agree saving these documents as JSON objects would be pretty stupid.

Take your example and add foreign character sets, formulas, and formatting. Now save it as a CSV.

Sometimes it's better to design for the future rather than for the minimal requirement for now.

[Jon Miller]

I think we are suppose to use doxygen but I know it isn't very complete.

JM

[Hauldren Collider]

Asher:
Alright, so we agree that XML and JSON have their place. The point I am trying to make is that XML is used in hundreds of areas where it is legitimately bad for the job.

XML as a data storage system seems wrong to me. There are many better ways to serialize data. I see no reason why it has to be human-readable. Consider that the data isn't going to be human readable anyways. It's data, it's a program dump, it doesn't have any meaning to a human. No one will be reading it, and we go through this whole hassle of trying to shoehorn XML there where it's not needed.


Then there's the fact that XML, while it serves its purpose better than anything else, does not serve its purpose well. The closing tags are a huge gripe for me. Then there's whitespace. Textnodes.

But most of all, there's the DOM. DOM has some genuinely awful features to it. For instance, DOMNodeLists are pretty much the worst things ever forever. Not only are they live, but if you change them, they reset. You pretty much have to constantly store the stuff in DOMNodeLists into normal lists and operate on them there. Then there's the fact that selecting elements in DOM is incredibly hard. XPath is okay, but trying to grab an element and actually walking the DOM is a pain. Not because the controls aren't fine-grain enough, but because they're TOO fine grain.

[Hauldren Collider]

I think we are suppose to use doxygen but I know it isn't very complete.

JM

We use doxygen here too, although I used phpDoc because I didn't realize doxygen existed for PHP. It should parse as doxygen anyways.

[Asher]

Asher:
Alright, so we agree that XML and JSON have their place. The point I am trying to make is that XML is used in hundreds of areas where it is legitimately bad for the job.

XML as a data storage system seems wrong to me. There are many better ways to serialize data. I see no reason why it has to be human-readable. Consider that the data isn't going to be human readable anyways. It's data, it's a program dump, it doesn't have any meaning to a human. No one will be reading it, and we go through this whole hassle of trying to shoehorn XML there where it's not needed.

You seem to think the only purpose of XML is to make data human readable. That's not the case, it's just a nice feature. The point of XML is highly structured, well-defined data. JSON is not highly structured or well-defined -- it's simple and loose.

Then there's the fact that XML, while it serves its purpose better than anything else, does not serve its purpose well. The closing tags are a huge gripe for me. Then there's whitespace. Textnodes.

I don't see anything wrong with any of that. Having proper closing tag is a data integrity check and aids the parser. A well-designed parser can infer a missing closing tag from its context and proceed with parsing the rest of the data. If you miss a closing bracket in JSON the whole thing may as well be useless.

But most of all, there's the DOM. DOM has some genuinely awful features to it. For instance, DOMNodeLists are pretty much the worst things ever forever. Not only are they live, but if you change them, they reset. You pretty much have to constantly store the stuff in DOMNodeLists into normal lists and operate on them there. Then there's the fact that selecting elements in DOM is incredibly hard. XPath is okay, but trying to grab an element and actually walking the DOM is a pain. Not because the controls aren't fine-grain enough, but because they're TOO fine grain.

This is a DOM implementation gripe, not a DOM gripe. I presume you are using PHP, in which case you cannot gripe about the implementation of anything as PHP is a ghastly, horrible language and implementation.

[onodera]

Asher, what's the point of arguing with a kid who has one project under his belt and thinks he's a pro now?

[MRT144]

Asher's likes dropping knowledge.

[Asher]

Asher, what's the point of arguing with a kid who has one project under his belt and thinks he's a pro now?

That's precisely what I had been doing for a bit over 1 1/2 years at my last job with our co-op students. They'd come in supremely arrogant about the ways of computers because they're used to being the top dog in their high schools or previous non-professional work experience.

The most annoying kid was convinced Haskell was the best language ever and could be used for everything. "Functional programming is so awesome!!". By the end of the term he'd changed his mind and was extolling the virtues of C++/C#. He's now working at Mozilla working on FF4 in C++.

[Hauldren Collider]

Asher: The reason I'm arguing this with you is not so much as I'm trying to prove you wrong so much as hear you prove me wrong. I'm learning a lot from this discussion.

Sorry if it comes off as arrogant.