[xquery-talk] why do you care what other people think ?

David Sewell dsewell at virginia.edu
Mon May 20 06:46:57 PDT 2013


On Sat, 18 May 2013, James Fuller wrote:

> Uche Ogbuji reminded us at last XML Prague to reach out to the digital
> humanities folks ... and I think this is an especially relevant group
> of people we should be trying to engage; librarians love this little
> language.

Speaking as someone in the digital humanities community, I am extremely grateful 
for the work that has been done on XQuery and on the entire suite of XML-related 
W3C technologies (XPath, XSLT, etc.) within the W3C working groups and by 
independent developers. As a self-taught programmer without a computer science 
background, I can't evaluate the theoretical arguments pro or against different 
styles of programming languages; all I know is that in the practical world, it 
is almost inconceivable that the projects I have worked on for the last decade 
could have been achieved as well as they have without XQuery and the tools built 
upon it (notably Saxon, MarkLogic, and the oXygen editor/IDE). Even if the 
community of users is small by comparison with Javascript or Perl or whatever, 
the impact of projects that rely on XQuery is, I suspect, much greater than 
people realize.

David


-- 
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 400314, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4314 USA
Email: dsewell at virginia.edu   Tel: +1 434 924 9973
Web: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/


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