It’s always interesting for me to dig into XSLT. I don’t use it a whole lot, so when I do it’s all fun and new. This time around, I’m using 2.0, which wasn’t really implemented the last time I was doing anything much with the language. Loving the new features; so far I’ve used several to good effect.
It occurred to me today that document conversion is an interesting niche wherein a ‘pure functional’ paradigm is useful. I still can’t see myself using a pure functional approach in many other areas, but I do have to deal with document conversion often enough that I’m glad XSLT exists.
I find the tree-transformation model of computation is an interesting mind-bender, though when I think about it, it’s really only mind-bending in combination with the functional approach. And thinking further, I’d suppose that a functional program of any size would tend toward the nature of a tree transformation… Hmmm, something to ponder some more.