XML as a Better Wha…?
It took some of us (e.g., me) longer to arrive at the party than others, but I thought there was now general consensus that XML makes for a poor programming language, with Ant being the vehicle by which most of us in the Java community learned that lesson. (I’d link to Duncan’s essay but am too lazy to find it since the original disappeared).
And now, Chris Anderson (the WPF architect at MSFT aka ChrisAn, not the Wired Magazine guy) thinks “XAML [is] a better C#“. I know Chris and respect him, but err… not quite sure where you’re going with this one, Chris.
Hopefully he means that XAML is better than C# at solving a very specific problem which happens to be well suited for a declarative language – drawing a UI. His description goes on to talk about other domains it could be applied to… all of which might benefit from a declarative language.
If those technologies never venture into procedural code, and the developer doesn’t have to directly interact with the XML, I could see XAML being better than C#… for that single task.
Bryan Young
March 13, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Bryan: Yeah, DSLs: good. But if you read ChrisA’s blog entry, you’ll see he’s talking about using XAML as a general-purpose C# replacement.
Ben Galbraith
March 13, 2007 at 10:05 pm