Google is evil, but man, I never missed XSLT. I'm old enough to remember it and it gives me war flashbacks.

The good thing is that it makes you strong and resilient to pain over time. It's painfully unreadable. It's verbose (ask chatgpt to write a simple if statement). Loops? - here's your foreach and that's all we have. Debugging is for weak, stdout is your debugger.

It's just shit tech, period. I hope devs that write soul harvesting surveillance software at Google go to hell where they are forced to write endless xslt's. Maybe that's the reason they want to remove it from Chrome.

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jeroenhd 2 days ago | parent [-]

I don't really get the hatred for XSLT. It's not the most beautiful language, I'll give you that, but it's really not as bad as people make it out to be.

I can't imagine wanting to use anything more complex than a for-each loop in XSLT. You can hack your way into doing different loops but that's like trying to implement do/while in Haskell.

Is it that I've grown too comfortable with thinking in terms of functional programming? Because the worst part of XSLT I can think of is the visual noise of closing brackets.

	▲	stackedinserter 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Probably you never _worked_ with XSLT (which is good for you). Very simple things quickly become 1K of unreadable text. E.g. showing the last element of the list with different something ``` <xsl:for-each select="items/item"> <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="position() = last()"> <span style="color:red;"> <xsl:value-of select="."/> </span> </xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise> <span style="color:blue;"> <xsl:value-of select="."/> </span> </xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose> </xsl:for-each> ``` Or ask chatgpt to count total weight of a shipping based on xml with items that have weights. I did and it's too long to paste here. > It's not the most beautiful language, I'll give you that, but it's really not as bad as people make it out to be. TBH I can say that about any language or platform that I ever touched. ZX Spectrum is not that bad, although has its limits. That 1960x 29-bit machine is not that bad, just takes time to get used to it. C++ is not that bad for web development, it's totally doable too. The thing is that some technologies are more suitable for modern tasks then others, you'll just do much, much more (and better) with JSON model and JS code than XSLT.