Wow, that's quite a write up first off thanks for taking the time to say all that!

Ok, getting down to the points you raised.

I never really paid lisp much attention, but now that I have looked at some source code examples I must say I find it utterly revolting and I am glad they didn't teach it at college or I may very well of left.. er.. *ahem* cough cough cobol cough cough

Having said that I can see how it brought some nice ideas to the general programming table, I am big fan of recusion and recursive structures, but I must admit these things you mention "currying" and "lambda" are currently completely opaque to me. I've heard the term lambda before, once about 5 years ago when a friend of mine who did a computer science degree at York was looking at an early version of aXML. She had quite a big influence on the direction it took tbh and it probably would not exist at all if not for certain suggestions She made at the time. Incidentally and probably a little off topic, that was when She was still a He... (I'm still struggling with that one)

Regarding basing on Plack and thus raising the barrier to entry, I felt that plack was very easy to get into, and eventually I have in mind to build a module called something like Task::aXML which installs Task::Plack and aXML onto a system from CPAN, and provides a helper script to configure it. When that is done, a novice will be able to just install it, run the configuration helper, and then begin immediately working on their site templates and assets. I see the novice progression path as starting at that point, then learning a little about perl to code their own plugins if needed, then learning to write their own modules etc. I think it will provide a nice shallow learning curve wherein baby-aXMLers will be able to become baby-perlers before graduating to full adult Perl. As you mentioned having a low bar like the one to entering PHP, will work massively in the systems favour if implemented nicely, and I know of a city in the U.A.E (Abu Dhabi) where I can find about 200,000 Indian degree holding PHP spaghetti authors who would lap it up, and produce code for litterally peanuts.

On the subject of intermingling code and data, that seems to be the only objection left to the system, now that I have fixed the efficiency issue. I honestly can't see where the drawback is to treating code and data as one and the same in this paradigm especially because the code/data involved is highly structured.

I can hear you about data injection, indeed I came accross that notion quite some time ago and came up with what I feel is a reasonable and secure solution. Sometimes you want users to be able to inject certain aXML tags; for instance on the forum I coded in aXML, I allow for a few tags such as (youtube)video_id/url(/youtube) to be used in the same manner as PHPBB's BBCODES. The (youtube) tag of course simply adds an embedded youtube video of the specified id or url into a page.

Anyway, the solution I came up with was to wash the input in the query data module prior to processing. Basically I scan for anything that looks like a tag, if one is found it's checked against a list of acceptable tags and if it's not there the brackets are converted to tokens which cause the parser to ignore them. Since the only way for an end user to enter data into the system is through the query data, injection of disallowed tags then becomes impossible.

In this context and with that data washing in place, there is just no need for an equivalent of taint, in the same way that by using metatags to describe the program there is no need for strict/warnings (except in the system's code itself, and the plugins, where the strictures are turned on by virtue of using the Modern::Perl pragma)

Finally about feeling talked down to and being subjected to code snobbery and such, what you need to understand is that when I wrote the angry responses which earned me my place in this sites virtual dungeon, I was actually in a lot of pain needing dental work that I couldn't afford, and it felt like I was posting into a space filled with evil laughing self important jackasses who didn't give a s*** about tearing me to shreds and making a mockery of me without actually really even looking at what I was doing or why. I was trying desperately to get the thing running faster so I can start launching some websites and get off the unemployment trap.

Thankfully shortly after that my Dad interviened and paid for some badly needed dental work. I still need more work but at least I'm out of pain and able to focus more on my work now. (still bloody unemployed tho)

As for degrees, since I don't have one I'm not certain as to what is taught to degree students. So when various people around here including whoever that tw*t is that keeps trolling me using the anonymous monk function, started throwing around terms I was unfamiliar with to criticise my work, I went off and researched the terms they used. Quickly I discovered that their claims were infact bogus and not actually connected to the reality of what I'm working on at all.

It seemed clear to me that they were exploiting the fact that they are better educated than me, and can use more technical sounding language than I can simply to put me down and brush me off rather than actually bothering to look at what I was doing and/or offer any useful help with it. There are some real tosspots haunting this forum, and there are some real good people as well, and if I was rude or nasty to any of the latter I sincerely appologise. I think Corion was one person for instance who tried honestly to help out and got a bit of a bad response from me. (Sorry C-man, you rock)

One tosser in particular tried to suggest that I am clearly no good at programming and should just give up entirely. After the huge marathon of self-teaching and experiments it took to get as far as I have I was less than impressed with that appraisal. Someone else also suggested that as a teacher of cobol they would of failed me, and yet whoever that was came to that concluesion with no real evidence, because if they knew the truth they would know that I was the best programmer in my class by an embarrisingly wide margin, and there was only one other coder in my time at college who even came close to being able to compete with me. (He now works for sony)

I'm not into boasting, I'm really not... I don't like showing off or sounding off about my high IQ etc, but when I'm being attacked and told I'm stupid or a fool for no good reason other than people have taken a group-think dislike to me then naturally I'm going to fight back. Someone said I was "so dumb" for criticising their solution to some noobies XML problem, I stand by my reasoning, the solution was overly verbose and totally unclear in how it worked to anyone who is not a perl adept. The guy asking the question made it clear he didn't need anything like such a complex answer... blah anyway I'm ranting so I'm going to stop now.