Lately I have been studying XSLT in a course taught by Wendell Piez. (Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Transformations is a programming language for transforming XML source documents.)
Wendell offered a comment that if working with XSL is hurting, you are probably approaching it in the wrong way. This applies to many other things in life, certainly.
In the Mumonkan – the Gateless Gate – a collection of 48 koans, the second koan is known as wild fox koan. Having recently reflected upon that koan at some length while thinking of the a-temporality of xslt, I’ve been reading some Zen into the programming philosophy behind XSLT. I’ve applied my own transformation to the question posed in the Wild Fox.
Shall the XSLT Master, applying templates with devotion, escape the law of temporal-causality?
It is worthwhile to think more about the FLOSS (free/libre open source software) context in relation to the Gateless Gate.
Not directly related, but I just read a Psychology Today article which reminded me of the wild fox koan http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=20080225-000003&page=1
It’s about magical thinking. The article includes some categories like the “sacred” which I think ought to be studied without the stigma of magical thinking–at least there are some good argument why religion and magic are not the same. Still I rather liked the article.
“To be totally ‘unmagical’ is very unhealthy,” says Peter Brugger, head of neuropsychology at University Hospital Zurich.
We tend to be oblivious to the degree to which magical thinking penetrates our day to day life… even much of our ‘well reasoned discourse’ is suffused with it.