The Horror of XML(or Insolence Part Deuxor Fabian Pascal v. Slashdot)

I'm not in a position to evaluate the quality of Fabian Pascal's arguments about databases, the relational model, or XML — both because of my own technical inexperience and because I have yet to read many of the articles at Database Debunkings which Pascal uses to back up his positions — but anyone who pisses off Slashdot posters as much as this guy, while making arguments that sound quite well-informed, at least deserves to be read. Plus, you have to love quotes like:

"The 'rush to convolute simple processes' is indeed a hallmark of the [IT] industry, and it shows. It is not an intellectual impulse, though, but rather the lack thereof. This too explains why the relational [database] model, one of the main purposes of which was simplicity, did not fare well in the industry. As I stated in the preface to one of my books, there is an economic incentive for complexity. Simplicity does not require as many books, magazines, seminars, consultants, conferences, and so on, that complexity makes quite profitable. Practitioners are so much vested in convoluted products and practices, that they lose the ability to handle simple ones. I am dead serious."

So, if you're like me, you're going to spend the next week poring over articles by Pascal like "If You Liked SQL, You'll Love XQuery", "Slashing a Slashdot Exchange", and "No Integrity: A Systemic Problem", in addition to articles he cites, such as: "The Horror of XML" and "The Myth of Self-Describing XML".

Is Pascal a nitpicking crank with few practical achievements to his name or is he a razor-sharp critical antidote to the analytical muddiness and groupthink in corporate and academic IT? Either way, you have to give the guy credit for sheer insolence (which, if you couldn't tell from my post on Michel Houellebecq's novel "Platform", is quickly becoming one of my favorite words) — so rare a commodity these days that it is enough to make me like old Fabian, even if he's wrong.