3 ms·
This is a straw man. The objection was never "XML is too boring", the objection was "the XML models an actual programming language, so we're doing imperative pr
by throwaway894345 4y ago
This is a straw man. The objection was never "XML is too boring", the objection was "the XML models an actual programming language, so we're doing imperative programming but without the ergonomics and syntax of a programming language". "It's just XML/YAML/HCL! Way easier than programming in an imperative language!" is such a farce (not only among build systems but especially among infrastructure-as-code solutions).
Just because it accepts XML doesn't mean your build system is meaningfully declarative.
- tannhaeuser 4y agoOh, I fully agree with your argument as it applies to the old ant build tool, which is in fact a programming language using XML serialization - the author even apologized for it when he realized syntax wasn't the hard part. But a maven pom.xml is actually a component model serialization rather than a programming language in disguise - unless you're referring to embedded ant scripts in maven files which is a thing, but not common enough to warrant criticism IMO. Scripted deployment tasks in a Java context were more commonly seen in Jenkins, and only recently spill into gradle build scripts (I've always thought gradle was following Jenkins' Groovy syntax for eventual integration but that hasn't happened).