[xquery-talk] XML/XQuery academic conferences ?

[Daniela Florescu]

>
> Few  of the cs phds  I've interviewed could do ANY of the tasks you  
> quote.  None had to pass an exam in making programs that actually  
> worked

David,

I am not sure if this is the problem of the Phds, or merely the sample  
that came to you for interview.
I had to pass such an exam.

But: I swear. I've seen them. They do exist. They roam freely all over  
the Sillicon Valley. They are all over Google and Facebook.
And they know how to do those things:  automatic parallelization of  
functional languages, automatic detection of indexes, etc.

**ALL**  of that.

Their problem is that they live in a world where working on XML is  
equated with having a lobotomy
("something REALLY bad must have happened to you...!").

Their peers and teachers, and all the other "stonebreakers" of the  
world, and all the other Stanford and Berkeley professors
  keep telling them them that XML is dead, and that if they work on  
XML they'll destroy their brilliant carriers.

That's what happened to me.
(I still have have a set of emails with such content, from "famous"  
experts in the database world, for the fun of others :-)

Even at my (advanced..)  age, it's not easy to take.

But when you are 20-ish something, trying to figure out what to do  
with your carrier, that's really hard.

And it's not their fault.

It's because the "grown-ups" of this community don't care to make any  
compromises to explain to the rest of the world
why the rest of the world should care about markup languages and  
functional programming as an information querying and processing
paradigm.

A world where the selfish: "keep it small -- aka, such that I can  
control it" is the king.

That what my original email was about.

Best regards
Dana