Matt Benson wrote:
Here's a link to Terence Parr's "Humans should not
have to grok XML" article:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-sbxml.html
In it he explains the distinction between XML as a
data representation format, the use for which it was
AFAIK intended, vs. as an explicit interface for human
consumption. Regardless of your own position, I found
it an interesting read. Terence is an example of a
noted personality in the OSS community who develops in
Java but has never touched Ant precisely _because_ of
its XML interface. So such developers definitely
exist, thought it's quite possible he is the only one
whose aversion to human-targeted XML is a strong
enough deterrent in and of itself. ;)
-Matt
I think somewhere in Ant-in-Anger I'm critical of XML too. If XML is a
language for humans and machines, then humans have already lost the war
they talk about in terminator.
Peter said:
> XML is actually easier that HTML as it is less forgiving with regard
to mistakes.
Is that easier or worse? Its harder to write well formed XML than a
simple HTML page. Easier to parse XML, yes, but write?
Now, regarding Ant languages. I'm going to be even more heretical. I
find it ironical that we are using a declarative language -Ant XML- to
describe how to build, test and deliver procedural code.
It seems to me that long term the goal should not be 'improve the syntax
of Ant', but 'radically improve how we code'. Does the syntax of setting
up the classpath for javac, junit, etc, matter more or less than the
fact that to run junit I first have to compile my code, then run the
tests? Whereas when I was doing some prolog work in december, I just
declared a set of prolog unit tests [1] at the bottom of my prolog file,
and I could reload the file and rerun the tests in one go. And because
prolog is a logic langauge, pretty much any prolog clause with real
values in constitutes a test case.
Now, I am not going to evangelise Prolog on everyone, but I found some
things really nice about going back to it
-its very graph centric. If you can walk the graph (especially
depth-first), then you get graph code for free
-lists are intrinsic to the language. Java only has arrays and
strings; no lists. So working with lists drops you down to objects and
unwiedly operations.
-incredibly fast dev cycle. That is despite the fact it doesnt come
with IDEs as good as IDEA.
Admittedly, this is very post-java, but that time will happen. And then
the language used for the java build tools will be a mere detail.
-steve
(1) http://www.swi-prolog.org/packages/plunit.html
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