Simple declarative models are great until they ... Aren't. Essentially you have a DSL. A DSL can be great if you use it frequently enough to know the insurance

Simple declarative models are great until they ... Aren't. Essentially you have a DSL. A DSL can be great if you use it frequently enough to know the insurance and outs. Like SQL. But a build DSL is something you muck with like ... Once every six months? And most build files I one off rather than write from scratch. I'm not going to o learn your DSL. I'm going to stack overflow it. And build systems no matter how genius prescient the authors are, do weird things sometimes. Integrate with so e proprietary library? Have a required code generation step? Pull a dependency from a weird location? Auto annotate code? Alas then you have to either be able to decompile the DSL to the base lang.in your head, or inject some "real code". And ... By the standards of this article when dealing with the problem of building code (which, come on, evolves to a workflow engine eventually, and not a simple one) becomes meta.