Why has XSLT never seen the popularity of many oth

Question

The use of XSLT (XML Stylesheet Language Transform) has never seen the same popularity of many of the other languages that came out during the internet boom. While it is in use, and in some cases by large successful companies (i.e. Blizzard Entertainment), it has never seemed to reach mainstream. Why do you think this is?

Answer 1

XSLTs uses functional programming - something most programmers are not used to (hence why some people consider it non-intuitive I guess).

Answer 2

It's great for xml, but not great for typical coding. It lacks typical basic concepts (ie mutable variables) and makes what should be simple quite complex (or impossible). Most of its problems stem from the fact that xml is a great data representation language but not a great programming language. That being said, I use it daily and would recommend it where it makes sense. In conjunction with external namespaces, it can be made more useful (calls to java, etc). In the end, it's another language to learn, and many coders would prefer to stick with something they're used to or resembles something they're used to.

Answer 3

I think it tried to cover way too many use cases thus becoming a Turing-complete (or so I heard) language. If you try to do any nontrivial transformation, you end up writing complex loops, conditions... in an ugly and verbose language, which is best done with a GPL.

In my view, this complexity makes writing a correct implementation of XSLT difficult and limited the available choices, thus, widespread use among the vocal hackers who often likes to tinker with small and efficient code, not enterprisey code.