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Looking through some of this code is a painful reminder of the time when lots of people thought XML was a good idea.

<math result="sf.spec.sbs.numberofjobs" operand1="${env.NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS}" operation="" operand2="2" datatype="int"/>

instead of

numberofjobs = NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS 2

Talk about a headwind to productivity.

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Every time I see the templated yaml used widely in devops (see helm charts for example), I'm reminded of this sort of XML used for declarative programming. It was terrible then and it's terrible now.

I cringe at the places I've used XML for things like declarative programming, its just too obnoxious to think about.

However, as someone who is currently pushing bytecode on the wire in place of such things, because reasons, I can only tell you the madness is just a toolchain away.

The example he gives may just be a config file. XML was very popular for holding configuration, replacing the ancient property name/value pair system.

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