Choice selections

Since I gather some of you like it when I get tired and cranky and wax verbose, I decided to treat you to some choice selections from a conversation I was having with an old friend.

SOAP is like a hand puppet with XML Schema rammed up its ass, and the closest I want to be to that is just far enough away to watch the nuclear bombs scour it from the face of existence.

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XML Schema is what happens when you put a bunch of W3C people together and say `come up with a simple type system'. they go away for a while and come back with this gigantic Rube Goldberg contraption full of bells and whistles and gongs that no one's ever actually succeeded in implementing but they swear it's possible and in fact one guy managed to get 50% of the way through the spec through the use of powerful hallucinogens before the flying monkeys in his dream took him away and forced him to lie face down on his bed for a while until his head stopped turning grey and doing 360 degree twists.

And then you blink again and it's everywhere, voiced by identical clones of the same moronic individual but with different faces, and you swear you can see out their back the tentacle of the beast that's pulling their strings like a puppetmaster.

NUCLEAR FUCKING WEAPONS.

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[In response to "Hey, it could be worse: Flash Remoting"] I suppose. The possibility of that particular choice selection of afterbirths from the freak show getting worse would, if I dwelled upon it, probably shatter the tiny thread that still connects me to sanity. Flash Remoting had better damn well r00t random library computers and use the web cam to discover when impressionable young girls are trying to use it and then remotely tenacle-infest them.

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I have to say this about commercial software; it tends to occupy a middle ground between soul sucking abominations from the seventeenth circle of hell which was specifically created to house these things because to put them anywhere else would stretch the fabric of reality to the breaking point and reveal to the world at large the true uncaring insanity of the universe, and Emacs, in terms of quality.

In particular despite Microsoft's spirited attempts and the bletcherous nature of DDE or the raw Windows API, there are things out there, almost all of them community standards, that beat the crap out of it.

It says something when it's easier to understand all of MFC than it is to debug C++ templates.

C++ in particular is an excellent example of the dangers of hill climbing, although one periodically concludes that they really must have inverted their comparison operator somehow.

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This, by the way, is why Graham doesn't get to program in Lisp very often. The world is afraid that he will rip the wool from the poor beleaguered programmer's eyes and tear the scabs free to uncover the festering pustules on the ass end of the universe that they've been programming with instead.

Much better that he just have a continuous headache from trying to cram useful but invariably square shaped thoughts into the round peg of Java.