> If you help build something important and impactful, call it X, it's easy to slip into year after year of being the world’s greatest expert on X, and when X isn't important and impactful any more, you're in a bad place.
Gosling, who he quotes at the top of the article, worked on NeWS, a primary competitor to X. And, I imagine he knows plenty of people who literally worked on X, since he worked at multiple major UNIX vendors during that period.
Getting somewhat far afield of the OP, but in healthcare, the bigger trend seems to be a move from HL7v2 past the dumpster fire that was XML-based HL7v3 to JSON-based FHIR.
> If you help build something important and impactful, call it X, it's easy to slip into year after year of being the world’s greatest expert on X, and when X isn't important and impactful any more, you're in a bad place.
He, of course, was co-author of the XML spec.