This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Keith Ray. Original Post: Ant Rethinking Feed Title: MemoRanda Feed URL: http://homepage.mac.com/1/homepage404ErrorPage.html Feed Description: Keith Ray's notes to be remembered on agile software development, project management, oo programming, and other topics. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Keith Ray Latest Posts From MemoRanda

The inventor of Ant writes:

In retrospect, and many years later, XML probably wasn't as good a choice as it seemed at the time. [...]

[...] when I fused XML and task reflection in Ant, I put together something that is 70-80% of a scripting environment. I just didn't recognize it at the time [....]

If I knew then what I know now, I would have tried using a real scripting language, such as JavaScript via the Rhino component or Python via JPython, with bindings to Java objects which implemented the functionality expressed in todays tasks. Then, there would be a first class way to express logic and we wouldn't be stuck with XML as a format that is too bulky for the way that people really want to use the tool.