Well, Adam, I can look only at the results of those efforts, and judge by the
results, sorry. I’m not a mind reader.
I offered two possible explanations fort such a strange outcome as XQuery 3.1
(it’s not an ostrich, and it’s not
a camel, but kind of looks like both).
I said:
"This can have two possible explanations: pure stupidity and lack of
good will.”
Ok. I can add another one: technical and political naivety.
Best regards
Dana
> On May 9, 2015, at 5:03 PM, Adam Retter <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi Daniela,
>
> I am not sure if I need to, but I feel that I might need to defend
> myself from your latest email.
>
> Let me be clear, I personally wanted to participate in the XQuery WG.
> I was not asked to do it by anyone in the eXist project and neither
> did I do it to advance the eXist project. My sole purpose at the time
> for enquiring about how I might join without working for a member
> organisation of the W3C was because I felt that open source community
> implementations of XQuery were unrepresented within the working group.
> I felt that the average user of XQuery, that could not afford an
> expensive implementation should also be represented within the WG.
>
> I was lucky to be invited to join the WG and I am thankful for that.
> Subsequently, I have paid out of my own personal pocket for every WG
> meeting I have attended. I can only attend those in Europe as the
> others further afield are beyond my means, and I have not always been
> able to attend all in Europe due to cost. I work on an Open Source
> project, almost all of the work I do is unfunded and I do it in my
> evenings and weekends because it is interesting and I enjoy
> contributing to the community. I did email the FLWOR Foundation about
> possible funding on more than one occasion in the past but never
> received a response from you. I have never been paid in any way for my
> WG efforts or reimbursed any of my costs by any organisation (that
> includes eXist Solutions).
>
> What I am trying to say, is that I am not part of the WG to achieve
> some sort of eXist-db domination plan, or for any sort of
> machiavellian scheme. I attend the WG meetings because I genuinely
> want to improve the language for its users, and for me that is more
> important than what eXist, BaseX, MarkLogic, IBM, Oracle or any other
> implementation wants. I also teach several XQuery courses each year
> entirely free of charge, and again I fund this out of my own pocket,
> my goal as always is to help the community. I think that XQuery is a
> beautiful language that brings a great deal of freedom to its users.
>
> I understand that you are unhappy with the design of XQuery 3.1, and I
> am sorry to hear that; I know that you were deeply instrumental in the
> original design of XQuery and spent many years working on the XQuery
> WG.
>
> All the best. Adam.
>
> On 10 May 2015 at 00:41, daniela florescu <[email protected]
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> Adam, Ghislain,
>>
>>
>> Com’ on. Stop running around the bush. I hate hypocrisy in technology.
>> Reading your emails made me feel back in the communist era, with the perfect
>> usage of a perfect wooden language.
>>
>> Since when “working well together” and “listening to each other” (what a
>> wonderful world !!!!)…..: guaranteed a good technical result !???
>> (Maybe they should have voted to see if Galileo was right or not …. wait,
>> actually they DID…. OUPS.)
>>
>> Since when this guaranteed any logical result, and any good, usable tool for
>> an industry !?
>> (Web services would be the first thing that would jump to my mind as a
>> graceful design of a “nice" community that all listened to each other
>> … as a nightmare equivalent to XQuery 3.1)
>>
>> More often then not, such a “nice process” ends up in a horrible technical
>> compromise which is good for no-one, and gets abandoned
>> by industry VERY, VERY soon.
>>
>> ============
>>
>>
>> You both prove my point: the design of XQuery 3.1 was done to “help”
>> selfishly and with a very short term vision two-three companies (Saxon,
>> Exist, MarkLogic), and with complete
>> disregard to the big picture of the needs of querying and processing
>> semi-structured data in the industry (which includes both XML and JSON).
>>
>> As for the choice between solving:
>> (a) XSLT maps and arrays (estimated # use cases in the Ks, includes all
>> three eXist, Saxon and MarkLogic) and
>> (b) querying JSON (downloads of Mongo+Cassandra+Cloudera+Spark+Couch+… in
>> the tens of millions of downloads…)
>>
>>
>> (let alone the comparison in the total sales number…)
>>
>> ……...very intelligently, XQuery 3.1 decided to totally ignore the millions
>> of use cases of Cassandra+Mongo+Cloudera+…., and “serve” Saxon and eXist,
>> and antagonize all those millions of use cases that need JSON query
>> processing.
>>
>> Again.
>>
>> Great.
>>
>> Thanks for your “contribution" to the industry.
>>
>>
>> Dana
>>
>>
>>
>>> On May 8, 2015, at 4:21 AM, Adam Retter <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> No, all the arguments were all technical
>>>>
>>>> Getting agreement on all these points was a very lengthy process with much
>>>> heated argument. Although the decisions made were not always the ones I
>>>> personally advocated, I think the final language works well.
>>>
>>> Absolutely! Whilst I am more of an occasional frequenter and
>>> contributor to the XQuery WG, having seen the level of collaborative
>>> work and perseverance that that has gone into adding Maps and Arrays
>>> to XQuery, I can say that I am impressed.
>>>
>>> From my perspective, it was a difficult process, but everyone worked
>>> hard together and the technical arguments were always foremost. Whilst
>>> working under the constraints of backwards compatibility and creating
>>> a cohesive data model and language, I think the result speaks for
>>> itself. Certainly many of eXist's users are very happy with the new
>>> Maps and Arrays work in XQuery 3.1 and we frequently receive positive
>>> feedback on this.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Adam Retter
>>>
>>> skype: adam.retter
>>> tweet: adamretter
>>> http://www.adamretter.org.uk
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Adam Retter
>
> skype: adam.retter
> tweet: adamretter
> http://www.adamretter.org.uk <http://www.adamretter.org.uk/>
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