I had a look at XSLT for transforming one XML file into another one (HTML, etc.). Now while I see that there are benefits to XSLT (being a standardized and used tool) I am reluctant for a couple of reasons

• XSLT processors seem to be quite huge / resource hungry
• XML is a bad notation for programming and thats what XSLT is all about.

It do not want to troll XSLT here though I just want to point out what I dislike about it to give you an idea of what I would expect from an alternative.

Having some Lisp background I wonder whether there are better ways for tree-structure transformations based upon some lisp. I have seen references to DSSSL, sadly most links about DSSSL are dead so its already challenging to see some code that illustrates it. Is DSSSL still in use? I remember that I had installed openjade once when checking out docbook stuff.

Jeff Atwood's blog post seems to hint upon using Ruby instead of XSLT.

Are there any sane ways to do XML transformations similar to XSLT in a non-xml programming language? I would be open for input on

• Useful libraries for scripting languages that facilitate XML transformations
• especially (but not exclusively) lisp-like transformation languages, or Ruby, etc.

A few things I found so far:

• A couple of places on the web have pointed out Linq as a possible alternative. Quite generally I any kind of classifications, also from those who have had the best XSLT experience.
• For scheme http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/kk-sxslt/ and http://www.okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/xml.html