Signs on the Sand

Her is what James Gosling, Java's father said in a recent interview:

Direct language support for XML has been a debate for some time. All these things at an abstract level kind of sound like the thing to do.

When it comes down to the details, one of the problems ends up being that using Java today you actually get pretty good access to XML.

And really what it would end up being is sort of syntactic sugar that makes certain constructions simpler, but can you come up with something that actually makes people's life better by enough that it's worth adding that baggage?

It's one of these things that these days is a community debate.

That's pretty surprising. And even disappointing to some. I personally consider my Java XML programming experience as a horror. Well, then I was mostly writing XML processing apps in Java when DOM and SAX were the only ways and so whenever possible I escaped to XPath and XSLT. Now reading these James Gosling's words I'm happy I switched to .NET.