> The entire structure would be in constant flux, rotating, morphing, and rearranging itself into novel patterns never before seen, hinting at the unimaginable depth of intelligence operating within.
It’s certainly ironic, being that anything an LLM says is instantly “forgotten” and never updates the model weights, and it’s abilities are finite with limited compute and precise costs estimated for each action it does.
XPath and XSLT are still active, especially in the publishing space where documents are not stored in HTML, but in other formats like JATS or DocBook and need converting to HTML when displaying to the user, or converting to other XML formats when interfacing with other formats/vendors like crossref. It's also still used for things like processing the US bill XML data (e.g. https://www.govinfo.gov/bulkdata/BILLS/resources).
The problem was that there was no interactive
computer system like CTSS at Princeton; there weren’t any computer termi-
nals either. All that was available was punch cards, which only supported
upper case letters. I wrote Roff in Fortran (far from ideal, since Fortran was
meant for scientific computation, not pushing characters around, but there
were no other options) and I added a feature to convert everything to lower
case while automatically capitalizing the first letter of each sentence. The
resulting text, now upper and lower case, was printed on an IBM 1403 printer
that could print both cases. Talk about bleeding edge! My thesis was three
boxes of cards. Each box held 2,000 cards, was about 14 inches (35 cm) long
and weighed 10 pounds (4.5 kg). The first 1,000 cards were the program and
the other 5,000 were the thesis itself in Roff.
"For some years afterwards, there was a student agency that would “roff” documents for students for a modest fee. Roff was thus the first program I ever wrote that was used by other people in any significant way."
I still use Troff as my daily typesetting tool. But I don't use Groff which doesn't handle utf-8 and is rather bad for accurate formatting. I use the less known Heirloom Troff, which is very good.
