Comment by jact

Xquery is what I would call a “weirdly good” language. It’s weird how good it is and how well designed it is relative to how little adoption it has.

The key thing is that since XML is a first-class datatype in XPath, trees are therefore a first class datatype. Since XPath is built into the language, you don’t need lenses or anything like that to do operations on deep tree structures. It just works. I am tempted sometimes to use it for more general projects than processing XML.