So he was wrong on the market share, the format, and the everything else. I think that's still a solid 'completely wrong'. He is, of course, right, about every single thing you choose to read into the statements that he doesn't actually make. I don't see him predicting the 'future popularity of document databases'.

From his article: Many common types of data are intrinsically heirarchical and loosely structured, so storing them in an RDBMS can be difficult. Examples: books, articles, and most other written documentation. HTML. Search indexes. Filesystems. Game worlds. Classical music scores. It's just easier to model some things this way.

I don't see how to interpret this as anything other than a document database. Could you explain to me?

Sure. Let's take another look at the article -

"Prediction #1: XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011."

It's still completely wrong. I don't see how to interpret it as anything other than wrong. Yes we can sift carefully through it to find some way in which it's kind of, maybe right, sort of. We're discussing Steve Yegge's actual predictions not whether filesystems or the Library of Congress are really a special case of document databases.

You are arguing syntax, I'm arguing semantics. {"foo" : 25, "bar" : 32} is just not significantly different from <foo>25</foo><bar>32</bar> in my view (and I imagine in his view as well).

I think we should just agree to disagree on this one.