I use XML as markup language, what kind of deranged person thought to turn it into a programming language? My problems with the Lua API led me down the rabbit hole of making my own VM and implementation, not looking at a markup languge, then go "what if I used this for scripting?".

[–] frezik@midwest.social 4 points 2 years ago

When they make XML do these things (or the way Github Actions does it with YAML), they're essentially creating a representation of the AST that the compiler would make internally from a mini language. So there's a few possibilities:

They don't know how compilers work and reach for a tool they do know
They know, but figure the problem at hand doesn't need the complexity of a mini language and start the project the quick and dirty way, and it gets out of hand as they add features
They may or may not know, but they do get caught up in the hype of some other tool (likely what happened with XSLT)