Perl did win, for a period of time .. expecting an interpreted language to dominate for multiple decades is unrealistic, especially with hardware advances that occur over time.
while I don't do anything with it today, I do know Perl/6 would be in contention for my 'deserted island' language of choice.
yes, its a typical scenario ... XSLT is one of those languages where people either love it or hate it ... I think its to do with the fact that it takes a bit longer to become productive or useful in XSLT, most developers are expected to just immediately start writing code that 'does stuff' these days.
Anyhow, I see most of developers pain with XSLT is because they never learned the basics of the language and thrash about ... perhaps thats the biggest fault of the language, in that its difficult to tell its story with an analogy to where people start from. Anyhow, learning any fp language tends to improve a developer as a programmer
XSLT v1.0 is severely limited and many of the idiosyncratic behaviour ppl associate with XSLT in general is because they hit some very hard to parse/understand/grok things in XSLT v1.0
I remember in 2001-2002 sending the following link, when anyone said 'I am having a problem with XSLT transform'
I can say with high confidence that I've probably written more XSLT then any of the commentators here ... respect completely their right to hate/love/ignore any tech, but many of the comments here are based on very little fact.
* first bugbear - XSLT is not an implementation of lisp (or insert lang here), we shouldn't care if it implements said language well or not
* XSLT is extremely well (saxon) implemented in some processors and poorly in others ... unsure what that has to do with the language itself.
* XSLT has more implementations then a lot of other popular languages (Ruby, Perl, python come to mind), that doesn't make it better (or worst) then those languages ... its just a fact.
* there are no security vulnerabilities in the design of XSLT that I am aware about (well, there are, and most certainly are in implementations, but at that level I can call out issues with every language and its processor(s)) ... stating it is insecure by design is rubbish
* anyone using XSLT v1.0 should know that there has been, for years, an XSLT v2.0 production ready version in the form of saxon-ce (w/ appropriate open source license) ... I can't explain why folks insist on using XLST v1.0, some are doing so cause they can't migrate to XSLT v2.0, many of them are unaware of new options.
I can understand why folks find XSLT hard, or hurts their brain or makes them want to cringe at the mention of an angle bracket ... teaching basic programming idioms is hard for most people, learning fp principles is even more of a bender (esp if you come from OO world) ... XSLT template matching is a powerful mechanism which allows one to perform transformations with a succinct set of matching rules ... but yes it is verbose and like many languages, XSLT has its ugly points to the language.
If you are allergic to angle brackets, then any language that uses them is going to be anathema to them, but every person I've known who have learned XSLT became a better programmer for it. Thats my own personally biased single data point observed 'fact'.
related to me by a drunk baker some evening many moons ago -
'sliced bread has more surface area, so goes stale faster; companies loved it because their bean counters found out that people ended up buying more bread for the perceived convenience. By the time they started crazy additives for longer life, people were convinced that sliced bread is better. Throughout, people were eating less and less bread ... as a slice with your meal so its usage has changed quite a bit as well.' As the evening wore on, he probably had a point, but I missed it.
Now I do not know the veracity of the above ... what is clear to me is that (like many things in the western world) bread is no longer bread (that strange sliced white loaf is probably full of sugar, etc) ... having lived in countries for 20 years where I slice my bread I've not noticed the incredibly time consuming act of slicing bread.
while I don't do anything with it today, I do know Perl/6 would be in contention for my 'deserted island' language of choice.
yet another dph