Probably controversial, but in a dozen or so years of programming I think XML probably represents the most stupid and costly ideas to've gained widespread adoption.
I honestly can't think of a single other relatively recent technology that's responsible for nearly as many wasted lines of code, unbelievably inefficient systems, and legions of developers who are terrified of bytes that don't render nicely in notepad.
I hate it. Just saying. (Downvotes expected).
Disagree completely if you're talking about XML as an extensible markup language for textual documents, for which it is a perfectly sane choice. Problem is, few people use it that way.
The thing that frustrates me the most is that people jump to defend it because it's what they know. It's like they're plugged into the matrix and they will fight for it until the end.
People love to write regexes to process their bastardized XML subset because it's "easy," without realizing that their regex is not even remotely an XML parser and would fall over at the first sight of CDATA.
The thing that totally boggles my mind is that I think it really prove-ably fails to deliver on literally every promise/benefit/design-goal that I hear folks claim it embodies.
This is better than spending next 5 hours writing a Java program to do it. Its not a permanent solution, but either way that Java program and the shell hack are both going to do the very same.
I would rather use the shell and do it, rather than spend the next 5 hours with Java and eclipse.
Your "combinations of grep, sed, awk, perl" will corrupt your data if your file happens to contain any CDATA, entities, unexpected formatting, processing instructions, etc.
Don't get me wrong, sometimes a quick hack is worth the risk. But it's certainly no reason to defend XML, which is what put you in the position where a quick hack was your best option.
So the impression he gets is, XML is going to add value to everything it touches. Most developers like me have no say in that at all, we have to just use it.
I prefer the hack to get it just done. But agree with you, none of that is a permanent solution.
OTOH, it eliminated discussions/arguments about what format to use. In a corporate environment, that can be a significant win in and of itself. (Yes, "win" should be in quotes.)
Java.
It's a shame that it's overused for what I guess I'd only describe as institutionalized laziness.. But I don't think it deserves to be mentioned in the same conversation as XML (when the topic is Technologies That Are Fucking Awful).
It's the funniest language I've ever seen.