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Schnada's Construction Site
Personal blog · schnada.decultureprogramming
Schnada's Construction Site is a personal blog at schnada.de about culture and programming. Since 2009, 35 different Hacker News readers have linked it 35 times, most often “Erik Naggum's XML Rant from 2002: Disturbingly prescient”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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35mentions?
35HN people?
2009–2026first – last linked?
spreading confusion since 1897 · pictures, words, comic strips; with a computerological sideline
Most-linked posts?
- Erik Naggum's XML Rant from 2002: Disturbingly prescient15 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2009-01-13
- /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2019-10-30
- Erik Naggum on Attributes in SGML, XML, Lisp (2001)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-05-15
- The Contempt Page3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-09-07
- Erik Naggum's Perl Rant2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-03-10
What Hacker News says?
This rant made me laugh one day: http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-perlrant.html Disclaimer: I don't know Perl and I have no opinion if this rant is deserved or not yet it's an enjoyable read.
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-perlrant.html
on “Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0”Submitted Erik Naggum's XML Rant from 2002: Disturbingly prescient as a story · 86 points
HN discussionerik-naggum's most excellent xml rant: http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
on “Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’””Submitted Erik Naggum on Attributes in SGML, XML, Lisp (2001) as a story · 72 points
HN discussionhttps://www.schnada.de/ Rather simple design, just a couple of images and text. But the text is German dadaist poetry, and I'm not really sure if parts of it or the pictures aren't computer-generated, based on the sheer amount of content, supposedly created by a single person for fun. On the other hand, the creator is kind of a genius, so maybe he really did write it all himself
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is the most unique website you’ve come across on the internet?”Submitted Perl rant by Erik Naggum as a story · 10 points
HN discussionI believe a more appropriate noun is "contempt" :-) I found this page [1] some time ago, maybe someone can find some good quotes in here but the page is kind of long and heavy and not super quotable, maybe some of you will find some gems in there. Top of the page is Xah Lee, a lovable, and sometimes a bit weird, cranky master of contempt: > The basis of computer languages' merit lies in their mathematical properties…
Comment linking /quotes/contempt.html
on “Programming Quotes”Submitted Erik Naggum's Perl Rant as a story · 8 points
HN discussion> YAML is considered by many to be a human friendly alternative to JSON I'm not disagreeing with the author here, but as someone old enough to remember the rise of XML as a data transmission format (and Erik Naggum's masterful rant against it[0]), it's strange because historically speaking both XML and JSON were also popularized as more "human readable". I would be curious how many HNers (and even more so newer deve…
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
on “YAML: It's Time to Move On”Submitted Erik Naggum's XML rant as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI have yet to read anything that convinces me that XML is good for anything . Just because XML in certain cases is less bad than some other cherry-picked technology, doesn't mean that there aren't other better options. See also Erik Naggum's legendary rant: https://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
on “When XML Beats JSON: UI Layouts”Submitted Erik Naggum's XML rant as a story · 3 points
HN discussionRIP Eric Naggum http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
on “XML is almost always misused”Submitted The Contempt Page as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> JSON is popular precisely because it doesn't try to solve any non-problems. This reminds me of Erik Naggum's XML rant: http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html "If a solution is much smarter than the problem and really stupid people notice it, they believe they have got their hands on something /great/, and so they destroy it . . ."
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
on “1 in 5 APIs Say “Bye XML” - JSON gaining ground”Submitted The Contempt Page as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIn a rant that was (at one time) legendary, the late Erik Naggum responded to the argument that XML was nothing more than another way to write s-exprs, and if you like s-exprs, the only quibble you have with XML is the syntax. Erik wrote, They are not identical. The aspects you are willing to ignore are more important than the aspects you are willing to accept. He went on to write a great deal more that I am not wil…
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
on “Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter”Submitted Das Dilbert-Monument as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> I do subscribe to namespaces, since it allows global referencing of names I have been forced to use XML one way or another for a variety of uses (mostly integration, not document storage - but still), and have not ONCE had a use for namespaces or multiple DTDs in a single document. I suspect no one has statistics, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is true for 99.9% of {users,documents,systems} - which, if true,…
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
on “How to Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML (2005)”For anyone who missed the pleasure of being trolled by Erik Naggum: XML rant by Erik Naggum https://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html Erik Naggum on Attributes in SGML, XML, Enamel(NML) and Lisp http://genius.cat-v.org/erik-naggum/xml-sgml-nml-lisp Erik Naggum Quotes: https://wiki.c2.com/?ErikNaggumQuotes https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum Death of a Troll, My Memory of Erik Naggum (1965 to 2009) h…
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
on “HTML is/as a programming language”If GML was an infant, SGML is the bright youngster far exceeds expectations and made its parents too proud, but XML is the drug-addicted gang member who had committed his first murder before he had sex, which was rape. https://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html We're going to have to think up something worse for CBOR.
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
on “From XML to JSON to CBOR”This is all quite good too: http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html Great to see someone take down XML, what a nightmare. Of course for markup nowaday we use the pragmatically simple "README.md" not "README.xml", although I'm sure the latter is quite popular amongst Java circles.
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
on “Why does Lisp use cons cells? (1998)”I don't know if this is a perfect representation of Erik's style, but his rant on XML is an enjoyable read: http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html Edit: I posted this because I am mostly unfamiliar with the man's life and work, and enjoyed reading about him.
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
on “Erik Naggum, R.I.P.”About as many as has been written for every other Lisp... cl-who, the plethora of Scheme libraries. FWIW, Eric Naggum has a good point: the syntactic separation is not good: http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-enamel.html
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-enamel.html
on “Hiccup – A subset of Clojure used for generating HTML”It's worth linking to the famous XML rant of Erik Naggum: http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html It's both very insightful and enjoyable to read.
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
on “Stop Comparing JSON and XML”I went through the articles with an open mind. I know this is going to be an unpopular sentiment here... but, to be honest they don't give a good impression of him in my mind. I think it's just really a bad idea to have a large part of your legacy defined in usenet posts. Here's his xml rant people pointed me to: http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html XML is great but it's not exactly the deep end of th…
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
on “Erik Naggum, RIP (2009)”As someone who was once a huge semantic web advocate, in retrospect there are so many issues with semweb which make it obvious it was never going to succeed. For starters, just like XML is a poor, verbose re-implementation of s-expressions (I still love Erik Naggum's rant on this topic [0]), RDF is an equally verbose reimplementation of Prolog clauses. During the early 2000s many technologies, myself included, where…
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html/
on “RDF 1.1 Primer (2014)”The more I work with XML, the more I'm convinced that Naggum was dead on: http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html XML is, for me, the classic example of the problem of reinventing things badly. The sad thing is that we've barely been programming for 60 years and we've already reached the point where much of our work is wasted in this process.
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
on “XML: Contrary to popular belief, it doesn't always kill babies”Erik Naggum on XML vs. S-Expressions: "They are not identical. The aspects you are willing to ignore are more important than the aspects you are willing to accept. Robbery is not just another way of making a living, rape is not just another way of satisfying basic human needs, torture is not just another way of interrogation. And XML is not just another way of writing S-exps. There are some things in life that you d…
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
on “XML is not S-Expressions”see also: http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
Comment linking /grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
on “The thing I hate about HTML (2010)”
