[xquery-talk] XML/XQuery academic conferences ?

[Ronald Bourret]

This is really interesting. I'm very curious as to why people think XML 
is dead.

All the job descriptions that come across my desk ask for XML. Entering 
XML as a keyword in Monster.com returns "1000+" jobs, which appears to 
be the highest number they'll return. Dice.com says 10803 of its 85033 
jobs ask for XML.

XML has done what we all thought and hoped it might -- become as 
ubiquitous and mundane as ASCII. Or perhaps that's just it: Nobody 
builds academic careers on ASCII.

All I can say is that this shows a remarkable lack of foresight on the 
part of academia. The technical part of the written world is slowly 
migrating to XML and it would seem that the opportunities are boundless 
for finding clever ways to query, assimilate, and build intelligent 
systems on top of all that marked-up text. Perhaps it's just too fuzzy 
for mainstream computer scientists?

-- Ron

Daniela Florescu wrote:
>>
>> 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
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> talk at x-query.com
> http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk
> 
> 
> 
> -----
> No virus found in this message.
> Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
> Version: 10.0.1410 / Virus Database: 1522/3948 - Release Date: 10/12/11
> 
>