• ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I use XML as markup language, what kind of deranged person thought to turn it into a programming language? My problems with the Lua API led me down the rabbit hole of making my own VM and implementation, not looking at a markup languge, then go “what if I used this for scripting?”.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      6 months ago

      When they make XML do these things (or the way Github Actions does it with YAML), they’re essentially creating a representation of the AST that the compiler would make internally from a mini language. So there’s a few possibilities:

      • They don’t know how compilers work and reach for a tool they do know
      • They know, but figure the problem at hand doesn’t need the complexity of a mini language and start the project the quick and dirty way, and it gets out of hand as they add features
      • They may or may not know, but they do get caught up in the hype of some other tool (likely what happened with XSLT)