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XSLT
Raised as a usability problem by 50 people on Hacker News over 20 years (2007–2026), in 41 threads.
People raised many different problems with XSLT, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 50 complaints
- Hard to grasp: control flow jumps between nodes in unpredictable order, mixing templates, modes and for-each2026-06-01
- XSLT 1.0 lacks features and is difficult to use for building pages2026-01-03
- Having to type matching closing tags is tedious and painful to hand-maintain2025-11-10
- XSLT syntax is human-unreadable, pushing people toward GUI tools2025-11-05
- Simple things look complex and complex things look obfuscated, so code is hard to read2025-08-30
- XSLT is unreadable, with tons of namespace imports and no debugging tools2025-08-30
- Hard to use, hard to debug, and extremely verbose2025-08-23
- Counterintuitive and convoluted, forcing painful contortions to do simple transforms2025-08-23
- Verbose, painful stylesheets with gotchas, plus a pointless extra XML generation step2025-08-22
- XSLT developer tools barely work, so template expansion is hard to inspect2025-08-20
- Writing programs in verbose XML makes debugging and tracking program structure very hard2025-07-21
- Grouping requires obscure hand-invented tricks; later versions have a weird syntax2025-07-21
- Commenter found XSLT very hard to understand when learning it at university2025-06-27
- No useful debuggers, so mistakes just produce wrong output silently2025-06-27
- Hard to understand where matching templates are, making scripts confusing2025-06-27
- String splitting and concatenation are verbose and hard to read2025-06-27
- Steep learning curve meant most developers couldn't use it effectively or fix bugs2025-06-27
- XSLT is very verbose and hard to read; XPath is torturous2025-05-03
- Writing XML-based XSLT code inside XML is awkward and nested-quoting unpleasant2025-03-28
- Declarative style makes trivial tasks a torturous exercise despite easy core tasks2025-02-13
- XSLT has a poor developer experience, making it hard to work with2024-12-31
- Standard library is near-useless and the language looks cryptic2023-12-31
- Hard to debug XSLT code when writing transformations2023-07-17
- Errors are fatal and diagnostics are poor, forcing bisecting to find what broke2023-06-20
- Implicit context node "." is confusing and hard to understand2023-06-05
- Errors give no stack trace, go to stdout, and dev tools break on reload2023-04-06
- Unclear which pattern to use and how the pieces fit together2023-02-10
- Hidden default templates make program behavior hard to understand, looking like magic2021-08-29
- Language is cluttered with bad decisions, limitations and bizarre ways of doing things2020-12-09
- Declarative transformation language is painful and frustrating for developers to actually use2020-09-25
- Specifics of the language are infuriating and punishing to work with, tools are terrible2020-07-23
- Hard to use, not simple syntax, and needs an extra processing step2019-10-24
- XSLT has horrible syntax that is hard to read and write2019-02-08
- Verbose syntax mixing XPath inside attributes, confusing XML attribute, element and namespace rules2019-02-08
- XML-based syntax is hard for most people to read and work with2017-10-19
- Transform specifications are hard to read and write in XSLT2017-10-18
- Hard to read, with implicit data flow and odd constructs2017-10-18
- Couldn't find a decent XSLT editor; the ones tried were overly complex2017-02-01
- Hard to tell which logic belongs in XSLT2017-01-30
- Commenter has never been able to figure out XSLT2017-01-09
- Hard to get productive, developers thrash about without learning basics2014-12-06
- Hard to figure out how to express moderately complex algorithms, and the code is hard to maintain2014-12-06
- Results are hard to predict, and edge cases force hard-coding and unrolled recursion2014-12-06
- Complex XSLT becomes horrendous and painful to debug2014-12-06
- Debugging XSLT is unpleasant and hard, and XPath works counter-intuitively2014-12-06
- Flash of unstyled XML appears before XSLT renders; browsers behave differently2014-05-19
- Practically unusable for anything beyond simple transforms2014-02-14
- Weird syntax and push-style model make it hard to write page templates2014-01-09
- Complicated tasks are a brain melt, far harder than in other languages2012-04-08
- Large XSL files become very hard to follow and tedious to work with2012-04-08