Re: Spurious error on recursive invocation of fn:transform

> Well, that's kind of what 2.0 *was*. The revisions since 2.0 have brought
> nice things, but in a more recognizably incremental sort of way. It was
> the 1.0 -> 2.0 transition that was the pretty much textbook Fred
Brooks-ian
> do-over with the advantage of the lessons learned from the first one.
>
> Or so it has always seemed to me.

I am referring to the volume of the specifications, not to the significance
of the changes.

While the 2.0 new features are surely the most significant and useful (and
Dr. Kay gave us his immensely valuable books), I believe that they didn't
increase so much the page-count 1.0 --> 2.0, as did 2.0 --> 3.0 and now
4.0. Or maybe it was 3.0 that exceeded some threshold after which even a
moderate amount of changes are perceived as more than one can stomach.

It seems there is an obvious relation between quality vs. quantity. We
could replace "quality" in the previous sentence with "usefulness",
"importance", "conciseness", "wanted and anticipated", "readable and
understandable". On the other side, if we witness quantity without so much
quality, this probably means something. To be clear, I think XPath 3.0 and
3.1, DM, and F&O, provided some very important and useful new features
(quality). But not exactly so with the versions of XSLT following 2.0. We
have so many new <xsl:putYourNewInstructionNameHere> instructions, that
wondering what their exact meaning is, makes the language more and more
intimidating. And maybe even the time that it would take to play with each
one of these has become prohibitive. Don't we deserve more cleanness and
elegance?

We are sorely missing an "XSLT 3.0 programmer's Reference" book, but
instead we are presented with yet another new version.

Thanks,
Dimitre

On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 4:13 PM Chapman Flack <chap-JULfBfA8satPFr4CO1/[email protected]> wrote:

> On 11/23/20 18:32, Dimitre Novatchev wrote:
>
> > This is one more reason not to add up to the existing versions of XSLT,
> but
> > to start anew from zero with a completely new language --
>
> Well, that's kind of what 2.0 *was*. The revisions since 2.0 have brought
> nice things, but in a more recognizably incremental sort of way. It was
> the 1.0 -> 2.0 transition that was the pretty much textbook Fred Brooks-ian
> do-over with the advantage of the lessons learned from the first one.
>
> Or so it has always seemed to me.
>
> Regards,
> -Chap
>
>
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