But, that's what XSL is! XSL is a Turing-complete programming language in XML for processing XML documents. Being in XML is a big part of what makes XSL so awful to write.

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stickfigure 18 hours ago | parent [-]

XSL may be Turing-complete but it's not a programming language and wasn't intended to be one. It's a declarative way to transform XML. When used as such I never found it awful to write... it's certainly much easier than doing the equivalent in general purpose programming languages.

Maybe by analogy: There are type systems that are Turing complete. People sometimes abuse them to humorous effect to write whole programs (famously, C++ templates). That doesn't mean that type systems are bad.

	▲	dfabulich 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		XSL is a functional programming language, not a declarative language. When you xsl:apply-template, you're calling a function. Functional programming languages can often feel declarative. When XSL is doing trivial, functional transformations, when you keep your hands off of xsl:for-each, XSL feels declarative, and doesn't feel that bad. The problem is: no clean API is perfectly shaped for UI, so you always wind up having to do arbitrary, non-trivial transformations with tricky uses of for-each to make the output HTML satisfy user requirements. XSL's "escape hatch" is to allow arbitrary Turing-complete transformations. This was always intended to exist, to make easy transformations easy and hard transformations possible. You basically never need to write Turing-complete code in a type system, but in any meaningful XSL project you will absolutely need to write Turing-complete XSL. XSL's escape hatch is always needed, but it's absolutely terrible, especially compared to JS, especially compared to modern frameworks. This is why JS remained popular, but XSL dwindled.