Jason, if you do that can you post the link in this list too, please? I would like to read it and I very seldom go check blogs, but I check my email daily. :)
-----Original Message----- From: Jason van Zyl [mailto:ja...@maven.org] Sent: Sun 10/24/2010 6:03 AM To: Maven Users List Subject: Re: [Repetitive]: Maven does not live up to its promises 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
