[XML-SIG] Scriptics Connect

[Paul Prescod]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> 
>Python
> used to be #1 in the XML scripting world -- lately, I don't see that
> much activity... :-(

I think that's just a sign of the maturity of the product. We've
implemented all of the obvious standards that are stable. XML is about
standards -- we support them as well as anyone except Java (thanks in
large part to the 4Thought guys) so I think that's a major "win".

I think that the XML SIG has closely mirrored the work on regular
expressions. People worked really hard to get to the point where Python
was "Perl compatible" and then haven't tried to push past that. 

A huge difference between the Python world and the other scripting
languages is that Python's XML implementations tend (like Java's)
towards standards like SAX, DOM, XSLT and so forth where other languges
are more focused on (what I would call) idiosyncratic weirdness. That
means that when standards are developed Python people are really quick
to support them (we have several DOMs, a few XPaths, great object
marshalling and so forth) and when there are no new standards we don't
do much.

Because Python people are often refugees from other languages I think
that we are also less inclined to adopt idiosyncratic stuff even if it
WERE invented. People in, um, other communities are more, uh, accustomed
to working with "weird non-standard stuff".

In terms of advocacy, you'll be glad to know that people in the XML
newsgroups are afraid to mention any collection of programming languages
without mentioning Python for fear of the inevitable followup:

>  Same with the System identifier of the
> DTD, although you may need to put the right thing there with perl or
> omnimark or Python (hi Paul!) or whatever.

 Paul Prescod