Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Wed, 16 Jul 2003

Lisp and XML, again

Earlier, I whined an old Lisper's whine about how unjust it is that XML, with all its noise characters, is seen as a human-readable language, whereas Lisp, with many fewer, is seen as weird. It appears that some other old Lispers are trying to make a silk purse out of XML.

I recently met Jay Conne, Director of Business Development at ClearMethods. They've developed a language called Water that makes me think "Lisp! In XML Syntax!". That's an oversimplification, of course. For example, it's also got prototype-style inheritance.

I only had the chance to read the first bits of Jay's copy of the Water book (on the way to and from the Wonderland T station in Boston), so I haven't gotten to the really good parts. What I've seen has stroked my biases, but is also different enough to awaken the novelty vampire within. When I get time, I'm going to download the runtime and IDE, mess around. Can the neat bits overcome the XMLishness? Is my bias against embedding code in HTML (JSP, eruby) wrong, and is this the right way to do it?

## Posted at 07:02 in category /misc [permalink] [top]