I’m not one to complain—much—but I did have to laugh at part of CBC’s The Greatest Canadian Invention tonight. Coming in at number twelve was the Java programming language, invented by Alberta’s James Gosling. So what did all of the on-screen graphics show?
XML.
Most of it was fairly generic XML, although there was a sample that was at least Java-related: an Ant buildfile. And I guess it looks computer-y to have dense blocks of characters with lots of <s and >s thrown in. But really, come on.
That said, Tim Bray, co-editor of and a major contributor to the XML specification, is also Canadian, so at least that part was right.