There is a pure functional programming language waiting to be resurrected from the ashes of XSLT, following Haskell's original idea that a program is a pure function from a stream of inputs to a stream of commands. I just hope that someone removes the XML from it, to save on the pain of my pinkies mashing those greater-than and less-than signs. I like the abstract idea that XML is recursively embeddable, and even the radical suggestion that maybe XSLT should be involved in metaprogramming its own syntax trees, but I am not sure that this is worth it. Maybe if we blur the lines between our code editor and a generic UI, someday?
Even Go, which is really not amenable to any sort of in-language DSL or syntactic sugar, is nicer to use than XSLT itself.
XSLT locks you in a trunk without enough tools to do what you need. I remember using a variant of XSLT Microsoft put out back in the day that let you embed Javascript into it... but then I noticed, why not just do it in Javascript? So I did. And it was soooo much better.
There are good ideas in XSLT, but they are so buried in a cascade of bad decisions and limitations and restictions and missing functionality and bizarre ways of doing things (and I mean, I speak Haskell, pure FP doesn't scare me, and they're still bizarre) that the best remedy is just to start over.
That's XQuery. Version 3.1 handles JSON elegantly.
At NLnet, we use it as a static site generator.
Apparently there's an online playground [1] and Beta support for LSP now [2]. I've only ever used it in a containerized-Java setting.
[0]: https://mjdresdner.medium.com/dataweave-2-x-playground-comin...
[1]: http://dwlang.fun/
[2]: https://github.com/mulesoft-labs/data-weave-language-server
Pure functional programming language, where every expression is a generator. And it's installed on a ton of boxes already.
