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Comment by FridgeSeal | Hacker News Reader

No you see Java devs have stockholm-syndromed themselves into believe that a giant stack of XML, or some unhinged mini-language are actually good, and much better than something the humans involved can actually read and parse easily and now to compensate with other ecosystems providing 85% of the functionality, with 5% of the pain, they’ve got to find some reason to complain about them.

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what's wrong with XML? Maven XML is a configuration not a programming language.

Is this a joke? XML is horrible to work with, more boilerplate than information. Compare your average maven file to a cargo.toml and tell me which is easier to work with...

"XML is more verbose" is a lazy criticism in the same veign as "Python is better than Java because you can do 'Hello World' in one line".

Maven files have a simple conventional structure and a defined schema. Once you learn it, it's a breeze to work with. It's not like you need to write hundreds of lines of SOAP or XLST — which is actually why people started to dislike XML, and not because XML inherently bad.

Edit: I'd also take XML over TOML any day, especially when it comes to nested objects and arrays.

For a descriptor verbose is superior. It's way clearer what you're looking at. Matching a named end tag is much easier than matching a }. Also, XSD means you can strictly type and enumerate valid values and you will instantly see if you've written something invalid.

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