Archive for the 'Opinions' Category

May 16 2008

XML is still evil

Published by Nerdmaster under Opinions, Programming

I love people. Everybody who knows me is aware of how much I respect and admire the average person. Software folks are no different. Most of them are very intelligent and never say stupid things regarding topics about which they have almost no experience.

So while I wasn’t terribly surprised to see that XML is still crap, I was utterly shocked to see that people still defend it.

PEOPLE, LISTEN THE HELL UP. It’s very simple. XML was built to mark up documents, not to store data. Here are some choice comments from really smart people:

XML became the default because of its flexibility in data formatting. And, because it has become so ubiquitous, almost all programming languages have built in ways of easily parsing XML. In fact, I do almost all of my web output using XML and then use XSL style sheets to transform it into HTML. I remember some blogger, can’t remember his name, blathering on about MVC and how you should make your output “skinable”. Well, if you produce XML output, your webpages are extremely skinable.

The problem here is that you’ve apparently killed most of your brain cells by listening to idiots tell you what to do all your life. XML is flexible for sure, but the problem is how it’s abused. XML is used for everything. SOAP is the worst example. XML is not for data storage. It is not okay to store data that isn’t meant to be human-readable in a TEXT-ONLY FORMAT. Have you ever seen how much smaller binary files are than text files?

Skinnable websites = marked-up documents. That’s what XML was built for. I don’t even like it for that very much, but it does work fairly well in that capacity. Marked-up data is a completely different situation.

I’m afraid I couldn’t disagree more. No, XML isn’t the easiest to read (by humans) of all the infinite number of alternatives out there. No, XML isn’t the most efficient in terms of space. And yes, perhaps it has been forced into places it was never intended to go. But you miss what I think is the most important point: it is rapidly becoming a standard way of representing information. I would argue the value of having a standard far outweighs the inefficiencies in most cases.

I would argue that you’ve been brainwashed by people who are only slightly stupider than yourself. XML as a standard isn’t a good thing, but even here your “logic” is nothing but a straw man argument. The author of the post didn’t say standards were bad, and didn’t even say XML didn’t make sense anywhere. He said XML wasn’t the best choice for every place it’s being used, which you have already admitted!

You’re an embarrassment! It’s not good to have bad standards! Look at SOAP! It is good to always look for a better choice. Where the fuck would you be without people ten times are intelligent as yourself always looking for better options? You’d be a fucking caveman. We evolve, we look for better options, we find better ways to get a job done! Standards are fine, but without constant analysis and reconsideration of those standards, our industry would never go anywhere. How can you claim to be an IT person and yet not understand this?

Following a link from that site to an old JSON vs. XML debate, I found even more idiocies. But one in particular just shouts out about the morons who’ve managed to become part of my industry:

As Dr Phil asks — What were they thinking?

No doubt I can write a routine to parse this, but look at how deep they went to re-invent, XML itself wasn’t good enough for them, for some reason (I’d love to hear the reason). Who did this travesty? Let’s find a tree and string them up. Now.

This is bad. This guy is a total moron. I mean, he didn’t even bother to investigate JSON before he said this most absurd of arguments. Not only is he saying, “Let’s not reinvent the wheel for any reason, ever” (which should be a blasphemy to all computer science disciples), but he’s saying JSON makes no sense for anything, ever. JSON may not be your cup of tea, but it’s faster than XML when used in Javascript (eval vs. parsing XML - sorry, but if you can’t figure that out, you’re just a dildo - only you probably get less sex) and for the most part, more human readable and writable.

Oh, but Dave Winer (Whiner?) gets even worse:

Dan, where are the benchmarks that say that on a processor capable of running Flash apps or playing Youtube videos that it can’t parse XML “cruft.” If you’re going to use an engineering argument, be prepared to back up t your assumptions with data. I’m pretty sure you can’t because I ran my own benchmarks on the end-user CPU of the late 90s and the overhead of parsing XML was negligable then, and now..? Geez Louise. How many gigahertz to people have these days??

XML parsing is a monumental task. This is clearly the ramblings of some dumbshit who’s never actually used SOAP, XML-RPC, or even plain old XML with XSLT on large data sets. Parsing tens of thousands of records (serialized from the Oracle DB because XML is so great) at my current job is a nightmare. XSLT transforms in some cases take 5 minutes or more, on blazing-fast hardware, using a C++ library (libxml and libxslt). In the late 90s, you’re going to try and tell me XML parsing had “negligable” (IT’S FUCKING SPELLED “negligible!”) overhead? What did you parse, “<hello />world” or something?

Fucking idiots. There’s a reason enterprises that were stupid enough to follow the XML trail are now buying XML-parsing hardware.

My comment is this - if you’re in the computer industry, don’t shoot your mouth off about things you’ve only thought about for 2 minutes while you jerked off to pictures of your dad. You sound like a moron when you do. Me, I’ve used XML in the real world. And a tiny bit of JSON, and a good deal of YAML (I even jerk off to YAML now and again). For marking up documents, XML is fine. For data that needs to be human-accessible, YAML and JSON are so incredibly superior, it’s a joke. Try them out in real situations before you make a total ass of yourself. Yes, I’m talking to you, Dave.

(Yes, I read his “ooh I dun learnt alot in that there diskusshins” follow-up. Ignorant bashing is ignorant bashing, regardless of your “oops” responses later, people)

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May 14 2008

Why Ruby is so sexy-awesome, part XXXIV

Published by Nerdmaster under Opinions, Programming, Ruby on Rails

I use Ruby whenever I can. Not specifically with Rails - Rails extends the language and adds some nifty things, but the beauty is all Ruby’s.

Today I was using Ruby (in a Rails app, as it happens), and I had this “API” that returns generic hash data. I want to be able to take data from any source (Oracle, flat text, web service) and return data that’s in a very simple and easy-to-use format, so I chose to just convert data to a hash on a per-source basis.

But how do I handle typos in hash keys? What if somebody asks for “person[:name]” when they’re supposed to ask for “person[:full_name]“? They just get blank data and wonder WTF happened…. I can’t live with this situation, because it’s just too easy to forget a key’s name, or make a simple typo. I could return default data from the hash, such as “YOU FUCKED UP WITH YOUR KEY, SIRS”, but that could find its way into production and then I’m out a job.

So after a tiny bit of digging, I discovered that a Hash can not only have a default value, but also call a default block when a nonexistent key is requested:

irb(main):001:0> a = Hash.new {|hash, key| raise "#{key} not found!"}
=> {}
irb(main):005:0> a[1] = :foo
=> :foo
irb(main):006:0> a[1]
=> :foo
irb(main):007:0> a[2]
RuntimeError: 2 not found!
irb(main):008:0> a.default = nil
=> nil
irb(main):009:0> a[2]
=> nil

Normally I’m good with non-strict default data, but in this case it’s great to know I can actually validate data in a way that makes it hard to miss typos.

It’s not as safe as C++ (edge cases are only caught at runtime), but it’s far better than Perl (and nicer to read or write than both, IMO).

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May 13 2008

Laid off? The one thing you absolutely need to do if you’re rich or stupid

Published by Nerdmaster under Opinions, Random Shit

I like people who have no understanding of the average Joe, but preach to him anyway. They’re cute and their naivety is endearing in a certain way. I’m talking about you, Jason Kester.

Get laid off from your job, go take a six- to nine-month vacation. It’s the best time in the world to do so!

You have a pile of saving [sic] and a severance package.

Savings, maybe, though that’s not a given. Severance package, though? How many jobs even offer those anymore? Mine sure doesn’t (at least not below the Director level, which is where the majority of IT folks are), and I don’t work in a small place. Don’t preach to a group if you don’t even know anything about them.

I’m not going to bash the rationale behind this thought - I can really understand the suggestion for people who have the means to take this advice. What I just don’t get is Jason’s blanket advice that says basically nobody has an excuse of any kind not to do this:

But I don’t have any money saved…

You can’t possibly be serious. Are you saying that you’ve been working in IT for all these years and haven’t put away a lousy ten grand??? Shame on you. Get a book on life skills and open a bank account fer cryin’ out loud.

Wha…? Since when have all IT people been paid so well that $10k is (a) pocket change, and (b) something to throw away when times are hard? Hell, the most I’ve ever saved is $8k and that was to buy a house. And my salary isn’t even on the low end of the spectrum! Some people just live paycheck-to-paycheck by necessity, and condemning them for it is not only extremely snobby, but just proof you live in a bubble far from the real world. In San Fransisco, for instance, the average pay for a software engineer means barely scraping by or living an hour’s drive away. Sometimes both.

At both of my professional jobs, there have been software engineers paid low enough that two salaries are required if the people want to even own a shitty home, much less living nicely. Jason, you’re an ass.

But I’m married with a family and a house…

Ok, you win. You’re screwed, but that’s the life you chose for yourself so you’re going to have to live it. It’s worth noting, however, that most Europeans wouldn’t consider that a reason not to travel. Right this second, there is a German couple pushing a stroller down a remote beach in Thailand, and they’re not going home for another month. What’s your excuse again?

Wait, so we’re screwed if we chose to have a family? A house? What if we’re happy with this choice? Are we just too ignorant to see the error of our ways or something? I honestly don’t get what you are saying here. But again this speaks to ignorance on Jason’s part - he has no concept of giving up something you want to have something else you want (the house - I’m assuming if I say I’m happy to be married and have kids he’ll just say I’m lying to myself, but having a house is a tangible asset - even idiot snobs can understand that). He also has no concept of how expensive it is to take the whole family to Thailand for us IT people paid a “normal” salary. He also doesn’t understand that sometimes kids are in school or that the spouse of the laid-off IT person has their own job.

But the most amazing piece: he doesn’t understand that some of us who actually do have the severance, the extra $10k, and everything else may not want to take the time off. Maybe it took me years to save $10k, and I don’t want to blow it on a trip when I could increase that savings instead. Maybe I am hoping to get a million in the bank before I retire, and every year I work hard gets me 5% closer to that goal, whereas just disappearing drops me by 5% instead. Maybe I want to really enjoy my 40s or 50s instead of waste my disposable income on a one-time trip that will screw up other goals in my life.

Then again, maybe Jason is just a stuck-up, ignorant white guy who simply hasn’t got a clue.