There used to be lots of little declarative DSLs. Think make. Now they have been co-opted by XML. Ant uses XML, but would be much prettier if it had its own DSL

There used to be lots of little declarative DSLs. Think make. Now they have been co-opted by XML. Ant uses XML, but would be much prettier if it had its own DSL. XML is orthogonal: it is just another way of expressing the syntax of a DSL. Ant's build file format may be ugly, but it is also a DSL (it is just syntactically encoded using XML).