begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 09:29:36AM -0800: > Stewart Stremler wrote: > > >Of course, I may be wishing for a pipe dream, and there's going to be > >a need for programmability in the build file for sufficiently large > >or complicated products... but at that point I start questioning the > >need for a universal build system. > > Well, and what will you write this "nonuniversal" build system in? > > Right .. a programming language.
Yup. > That's what SCons recognizes. Provide scaffolding so that people can do > the common things simply and quickly. However, you can drop down into > Python when you actually need to do something outside the scope of the > scaffolding. Ah, but that's not the problem. Make can do a lot of that, what with embedded scripts and suchlike. The problem is that the I-am-l33t crowd likes to do clever things outside the scaffolding that *can* be done in the scaffolding, 'cuz being cool and clever and tricky is fun. Then regular developers ape these idioms... and you end up with needlessly clever "tricks" everywhere. > This is the problem with make and Ant. They work great as long as you > are within the scaffolding, but you can't go outside the scaffolding > from inside the build file. Yes. Which means there's a limit to how clever one can be in the build file, which in turn means that there's a hope that someone else who looks at the build file to have confidence that they'll be able to understand it with only a little bit of work. There may be no solution that would make me happy. I don't know. This may be a topic about which I'll gripe for the remainder of my days. Not all problems have good solutions. > >I like Perl a whole lot more than Python (not hard, given my reaction to > >Python). If it's processing text files, I reach for Perl; if it's to > >glue programs together, I reach for TCL; > > Then you aren't really comparing Python to Perl. You are comparing > Python to Tcl. Fair enough. > And your assessment is correct--Tcl and Python are in > the same class. I tend to think that some of the Python features are a > bit better integrated than Tcl (classes, for example). However, the > benefits, if any, of moving to Python from Tcl are so slight that it > wouldn't be worth your time wasted learning the language. I think you may be the first Python fan to tell me that. :) > Given your preferences, I would tell you to use Ruby, anyhow. It does look appealing. -- Still trying to get comfortable with non-trivial GST programs. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
