So this week, I was teaching a new employee about the system. He is 30 years old and has been in the industry for six years now. At one point, I described an external tool that we use, which produces an XML file. Something felt off about his questions, and then a realization hit me:<p>"Do you know what XML is?"<p>He didn't.<p>I have a few takeaways:<p>1. I'm old.
2. I envy him—I hate XML. 99% of the time, it actively sabotages my work.
3. JSON simplicity won.<p>That's it. No moral.
This doesn't sound right.<p>A 30 year old engineer with 6 years of industry experience should know what XML is.<p>This isn't a generational gap. I would argue that in a large sample of other 30 year old engineers with 6 years of experience that most of them would know what XML is.<p>Something else is at play here.
Interesting.<p>Where I worked, a critical financial process kept on aborting flagging value "-2147483648" as bad. Unknown to me, 2 groups, including the people I work with, were baffled for at least a week.<p>In a staff meeting (via on-line) someone brought it up. I said that value has a meaning, I will check and let you know. After a quick check I told them the data being processed had a value that was too large. The end result the data type was changed and all went well. This happened on a packaged ERP system the company was using.<p>I am sure there will be many more of these little things that people these days takes for granted.
"I envy him" - when I read at HN in comments when people discuss something I don't know, I envy them. I suspect that OP is also more about this (reading from his frustration), but "knowing something" doesn't always mean "have to work with something". Not knowing even at least vaguely that XML is something related to HTML is a flag of the lack of interest in the sphere you're working in
>JSON simplicity won<p>I'm in my mid-30s and work with 20-somethings who insist that YAML is even simpler. I hope you turn out to be right because after a couple of years of staring at Kubernetes manifests I still don't agree with them.
It always seemed to me that most of the hate around XML was really misdirected hate for SOAP. XML (and particularly XSDs) I rather liked, but maybe I just never dove deep enough to feel the pain.
I've never understood the hate for XML. I'm not a pro, but I found xmlstarlet easy to pick up and use, while jq still frustrates me (a lot of escaping issues).
XML. Bah! That’s new fangled stuff.<p>Back in the day, we’d find ways to redefine packed fields in EBCDIC flat files to save a couple of bytes. Kids these days have no idea how many turtles are under the one their feet are upon.
I have 15 yrs exp but I haven't used XML in last 6 years :)<p>(I used lot of S3 via aws cli but only saw XML in server response :D while debugging)
As a mentor is the security field I found curiosity is key - I have absolutely no problem someone having 0 clue about something but with a good foundation they need to kick into 5th gear.<p>Few are able to do it in a reasonable amount of time - During these situations the ressource ain't the problem - it's the person who took them in that didn't make the right choice...<p>But yeah I'm with you 100% - having no clue about XML is kinda of scary tbh.