June 1, 2026
Angle Brackets, But Make It Drama
The SLAX Scripting Language: An Alternate Syntax for XSLT
A new way to write a famously painful coding tool has commenters rolling their eyes
TLDR: SLAX is Juniper’s simpler-looking way to write XSLT, an old tool for reshaping structured data, and it includes open-source extras like a converter and debugger. Commenters mostly weren’t sold, arguing it looks too similar to the original and roasting XSLT itself as a problem nobody wanted solved.
Juniper’s SLAX is being pitched as a friendlier way to write XSLT, a long-running language used to turn one pile of structured text into another. In plain English: it promises to make a famously awkward tool less miserable by replacing walls of angle brackets with something closer to old-school programming syntax. It even comes with an open-source engine, converter, debugger, and profiler, which sounds impressively practical on paper. But in the comments? Absolute side-eye.
The biggest mood was not “wow, exciting,” but “wait… is this actually different?” One reader bluntly said the docs looked “roughly identical” to the original, while another shrugged that it’s basically the same thing with a shorter outfit on. That kicked off the core drama: is SLAX a useful cleanup for people stuck with legacy systems, or just a cosmetic makeover for a language many already avoid? One commenter joked that saying the scripts are easier to maintain might “go against the official specification of XML,” which is exactly the kind of nerd sarcasm the internet lives for.
And then came the real knives out. One hot take called XSLT “the data transform language no one asked for and no one needs,” which is less a review and more a public execution. Another commenter added a modern twist, saying small improvements used to matter more, but now tools like AI may just write the old format for you anyway. So yes, SLAX arrived promising relief — and the crowd responded with skepticism, snark, and a few beautifully savage one-liners.
Key Points
- •The article defines SLAX as an alternate syntax for XSLT, intended to make XML transformations easier to read and write.
- •SLAX uses a syntax modeled after Perl and C while preserving core XSLT concepts as language constructs.
- •The SLAX manual includes an overview, a reference for language statements, and documentation for built-in functions.
- •The open source libslax implementation can parse and execute SLAX and convert between SLAX and XSLT.
- •libslax was originally developed within Juniper Networks' JUNOS Operating System and released under a BSD license.