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Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:14:04 -0500
From: "Dominique Devienne" <ddevienne@gmail.com>
To: "Ant Developers List" <dev@ant.apache.org>
Subject: Re: [DISCUSS] EasyAnt: Ant based pre packaged build system for java
 projects
In-Reply-To: <16976420.post@talk.nabble.com>
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	 <16976420.post@talk.nabble.com>

On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 1:19 AM, Ittay Dror <ittay.dror@gmail.com> wrote:
>  The root of this is, I think, because while dealing with all this build
>  logic, both frameworks refused to embrace the principals behind OOP. Both
>  obviously need a backing language to actually do things and have chosen
>  Java, but the front end is not OO.

Interesting thoughts Ittay. What you write meshes with
JavaScript-based dream-Ant code posted a few weeks ago by one of the
commiters (from SUN I believe), to which Stefan answered with LISP
code I think ;-) All this to say that you are not alone these lines.

But while I agree that having a true scripting language for Ant would
help (OO, prototype-based, or functional, leaning towards the latter
for Ant myself), I think it's important to remember than good builds
are *declarative* in nature. Using a pure language, when most have
little or no support to declare your intent, would make scripts
unreadable.

Lots of people argue, for good reasons too, that large Ant scripts are
already unreadable, but my point is that being *declarative* is
essential to builds in general and Ant in particular. And I'll just
stop at that ;-) --DD

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