The ugliest code I ever wrote: a parser generator in XSLT

Mmm, coding with mere hours (nay, minutes!) left has caused me to produce simultaneously some of the msot awful and cleverest code I've ever written. But you know what they say about clever code...

Ouch. I hate working with XSLT, I used to use these to update eclipse update sites when I was doing release engineering at my old job.

As an aside, if I took all the effort I spent in doing things the hard way to prove somebody wrong and spent that effort on making money, my life would be a lot better right now.

I'm sure you can't make any significant money. Prove me wrong!

You'll thank me later... ;)

lol where were you 5 years ago?

I recently moved from using XSLT in MVC web frameworks to StringTemplate and I have to say that I am really enjoying it - XSLT can be nice, but often isn't, and can suffer lots of irritating problems with namespaces etc.

I'm still quite fond of XPath though.

I friend of mine swears by using XLST for his Java code generator, because its syntax is orthogonal to Java and therefore the code really 'stands out'.

Haven't used it myself in years though.