Fine by me. I'm still looking for "maven enlightenment", and if I can contribute to this (even in a negative way), that's great.
Ken On Oct 24, 2010, at 8:03 AM, Jason van Zyl wrote: > Kenneth do you mind if I use the body of this rant in a blog entry? I will > leave it verbatim and won't quote anything out of context. > > There are many people who misunderstand Maven at a fundamental level, but in > sum total not many Maven users or people attempting to use Maven, actually > traffic this list. It would probably be more instructive to have your rant > and my answers in a place where more people can see them. > > Would that be OK? > > On Oct 23, 2010, at 5:15 PM, Kenneth McDonald wrote: > >> First, note that I did tag this as repetitive: You don't need to be reading >> it if you don't want to be rehashing recent issues. >> >> <beginning of rant> >> However, I want to give a concrete example of just why I dislike maven (and >> all other XML solutions) so far. I am trying to do what I think should be a >> reasonably easy thing to do--upload onto github (or something similar) >> current documentation for the project I have hosted on github. So far the >> best solution I've seen involves making another branch of my project and >> including the documentation there. This is fundamentally wrong (the docs are >> _part_ of the project), but I'm not blaming maven here. It's probably a git >> thing I don't yet understand. >> >> However, once we get past that, the pom files necessary to upload the docs >> are daunting, to say the least. >> >> Even more than that, though, the pom files are fundamentally unreadable. Oh >> I don't mean you can't puzzle through them in an afternoon or so if you have >> the time. Of course you can. But (and I think this deserves to be in caps), >> XML FILES ARE FUNDAMENTALLY WRITTEN WITH THE EASE OF THE COMPUTER, NOT THE >> HUMAN, AT HAND. I mean, that's just a simple statement of fact, not an >> opinion. I just don't get how people can be so oblivious to this. Would you >> really want to program in a dialect of XML? How many people do you know who >> do so? Do you really think that all of the work that has been done on >> parsers and compilers over the last thirty years has been in vain because, >> realistically, humans should just program in XML? I open up an XML file, and >> unless I'm quite familiar with the "dialect" of XML in use, simply >> understanding the structure takes at least half an hour. THEN I need to >> understand the content. There is too much redundancy, too few structural >> cues to indicate meaning, too few keywords (yes, they're important!), too >> much nesting, too little ordering in that nesting...I could go on. >> >> Of course people will dispute this. They're wrong. If they were right, we >> would have had something like XML for all our programming needs twenty years >> ago. Sorry people, you're just plain wrong. >> >> Now, what are the claims made for (or implied by) maven: >> 1) That it is declaratively, not procedurally, based. >> 1-a) Whoop-te-do. So are makefiles. Sure, they've accumulated a lot of crud >> over the years (and a rewrite _like_ maven was probably necessary to clear >> this out), but makefiles are, at their core pretty simple. You have a build >> target. It depends on other build targets. You build those other targets, >> and then you build what you're working on. Is this revolutionary? >> 1-b) I've mentioned this before, but Prolog has been doing declarative >> programming for years. Without obscure semantics. With lots of extra >> expressive power, like list manipulations, arithmetic, etc. etc. With an >> understandable syntax. With lots of extra libraries. Would it have really >> been so bad to base a declarative codebase on Prolog, a mature, proven >> technology? >> 2) XML is standards based. >> 2-a) Sure. Like Prolog. Or even (choose a variant of) LISP, for god's sake. >> All of these "languages" are standards compliant until they're not. XML will >> suffer the same fate. >> 3) XML makes it easy to interoperate with other systems. >> 3-b) This is the biggest piece of bullshit I've ever heard. It totally >> confuses a data format (let's say, "ASCII") with a data standard (let's say, >> "CORBA", though that's stretching things.) XML is a data format, pure and >> simple. No matter how hard it tries (remember DTDs?), it cannot attain the >> status of a data standard, because the needs of data standards evolve and >> continually require new things. So a data format such as ASCII, can have >> quite a long life--but trying to do the same thing to a data standard is a >> pointless exercise, and will not hold. >> 4) Apache is wedded to XML. >> 4-a) This one really pisses me off because I suspect it's absolutely true. >> I believe that Apache has a large number of very talented programmers, and I >> believe they are, in large respect, wasting their time because they have >> come to worship XML. I don't get it. There are things for which XML is >> appropriate. There are also so many things for which it's not, that why >> would you spend all of your time there? I don't have an answer. >> >> Anyway >> </end of rant> >> Ken >> --------------------------------------------------------------------- >> To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@maven.apache.org >> For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@maven.apache.org >> > > Thanks, > > Jason > > ---------------------------------------------------------- > Jason van Zyl > Founder, Apache Maven > http://twitter.com/jvanzyl > --------------------------------------------------------- > > Three people can keep a secret provided two of them are dead. > > -- Unknown > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@maven.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@maven.apache.org
