My work as a software developer involves having to read a lot of XML files. To me, nothing is more painful than having to sort through structured markup data. I know there won't be many responses to this but I'm curious to see if this is common.

One thing I'm very good at is structures and systems. XML has a cousin X12, if you think XML is hard to read stay a long way away from X12. I do prefer working with an editor that marks up the commands with colors and so on, particularly when working with SQL. But if it's all a bunch of gray text I'll take that too.

I've picked up a reputation with other programmers, if their work doesn't run have me look at it. It generally takes me less than a minute to find the typo on the screen. That incidently is something I became good at after starting to take meds. The structures and systems thing I've been good at my whole life.

I'm a programmer working in a business unit, my job goes beyond programming and into identifying ways to improve processes. Nice part it fits my politics very well I've believed government needs to be more efficient and that's where I'm working. :)

I guess it's just me ;)

I've found that I can read XML better when I'm on medication, though. I know I wrote plenty of code before syntax coloring but I would hate to go back. Every time I get a better IDE, I wonder how I survived with the old one (Eclipse is my current favorite).

Debugging is a different story. I can find problems much quicker than the guys I work with. In fact, I think ADD helps with debugging because I can bounce my attention around different parts of the system and don't get boxed in with assumptions of what should be correct vs. what is.

I also develop software for the government and there is plenty of room to make it more efficient.

One thing I'm very good at is structures and systems. XML has a cousin X12, if you think XML is hard to read stay a long way away from X12. I do prefer working with an editor that marks up the commands with colors and so on, particularly when working with SQL. But if it's all a bunch of gray text I'll take that too.

I used to work with X.12. I actually prefer X.12 since it's very terse, and you don't have to look through as much extra stuff as you do for XML. I've never been much of a fan of XML, especially in configuation files.

LOL, I'm a Web-Services/DB developer and I love/hate it. Love it for it's versatility and ease in passing complex data structures between heterogenous platforms, hate it because it is so bloody F-A-T, what a beating in bandwidth and all other resources passing all that freakin text to describe what may be a single bit.

Yes, I also despise having to read/format it in a text editor. If you're a developer, write yourself a nice treeview with expandable nodes and plop the gook into a parser. That's assuming it's well-formed and will load. If it's not, that may be why you're looking at it in the first place, but you can let the parser tell you where it's bad, and, if it's not your's, let the author deal with it.