Like Ron says, I would point out that XML is still very much alive and
thriving in areas where it's indispensable for understanding
unstructured data[1]. This is possibly a more mundane, "solved" problem
from an academic perspective - but it doesn't mean that there's not
massive business value in working with data like that.
I wonder what difference the rise of the "Big Data" meme will have on
XML. After all, if 80% of the data created is unstructured, then surely
XML is the obvious way to comprehend that data.
John
[1] or semi-structured data, or document shaped data, or your buzzword
or choice :-).
On 13/10/11 06:31, Ronald Bourret wrote:
This is really interesting. I'm very curious as to why people think XML
is dead.
All the job descriptions that come across my desk ask for XML. Entering
XML as a keyword in Monster.com returns "1000+" jobs, which appears to
be the highest number they'll return. Dice.com says 10803 of its 85033
jobs ask for XML.
XML has done what we all thought and hoped it might -- become as
ubiquitous and mundane as ASCII. Or perhaps that's just it: Nobody
builds academic careers on ASCII.
All I can say is that this shows a remarkable lack of foresight on the
part of academia. The technical part of the written world is slowly
migrating to XML and it would seem that the opportunities are boundless
for finding clever ways to query, assimilate, and build intelligent
systems on top of all that marked-up text. Perhaps it's just too fuzzy
for mainstream computer scientists?
-- Ron
Daniela Florescu wrote:
Few of the cs phds I've interviewed could do ANY of the tasks you
quote. None had to pass an exam in making programs that actually worked
David,
I am not sure if this is the problem of the Phds, or merely the sample
that came to you for interview.
I had to pass such an exam.
But: I swear. I've seen them. They do exist. They roam freely all over
the Sillicon Valley. They are all over Google and Facebook.
And they know how to do those things: automatic parallelization of
functional languages, automatic detection of indexes, etc.
**ALL** of that.
Their problem is that they live in a world where working on XML is
equated with having a lobotomy
("something REALLY bad must have happened to you...!").
Their peers and teachers, and all the other "stonebreakers" of the
world, and all the other Stanford and Berkeley professors
keep telling them them that XML is dead, and that if they work on XML
they'll destroy their brilliant carriers.
That's what happened to me.
(I still have have a set of emails with such content, from "famous"
experts in the database world, for the fun of others :-)
Even at my (advanced..) age, it's not easy to take.
But when you are 20-ish something, trying to figure out what to do with
your carrier, that's really hard.
And it's not their fault.
It's because the "grown-ups" of this community don't care to make any
compromises to explain to the rest of the world
why the rest of the world should care about markup languages and
functional programming as an information querying and processing
paradigm.
A world where the selfish: "keep it small -- aka, such that I can
control it" is the king.
That what my original email was about.
Best regards
Dana
--
John Snelson, Senior Engineer http://twitter.com/jpcs
MarkLogic Corporation http://www.marklogic.com
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