Nope, no patents/fascination with Prolog. It's just that Maven declares itself to be "declarative" rather than "procedural", and if those terms mean what they usually mean, I can't think why it would have gone to the trouble of spinning an entirely new system, only to ignore, what, 30 years'?, of progress in declarative systems. Why reinvent the wheel?
As to why I don't do this myself, the answer is simple: I don't have the technical knowledge to do so. This will, of course, inspire some people to say, "Well, he doesn't know what he's talking about, let's ignore him." But I'm a very talented tech writer, with a significant amount of investment in programming. So the former statement could have been something like, "He's never implemented anything in MSWord, so why should anything he says about Word be of interest?" But of course, the whole point is that I'm a _user_ of these technologies, with an ability to understand what is and is not possible. I comprehend, I really do, the advantages of XML, and I know that one of those advantages is _not_ human readability (except in extremis). And this is what drives me nuts. I remember so many cases of "the" technology that was going to save the software world. ClearCase. Rational Rose. UML. Fifth gen computing (from which we got Prolog.) So many others. So when I see a potentially hugely useful solution like maven, implemented in terms of XML, it almost makes me want to hurl. XML is not some magic witch's powder that you throw against the world. It's a verbose, redundant, and difficult to read standard for specifying data structures. The one real win we got out of that game, IMHO, was unit testing, which is really and truly a useful technology. And again, I'll say: the mere _existence_ of Maven polyglot should be enough to convince people that Maven, by itself, is not the be-all and end-all. What do I hope to gain from these exchanges, aside from venting some spleen? Well, really, I hope to make at least a few people think that maybe the current solution isn't the ideal, so that when the time comes along for the next solution (as it will), my opinion has some small but noticeable influence. Cheers, Ken On Oct 23, 2010, at 4:59 PM, Wayne Fay wrote: >> 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? > > I didn't say it before (saved as draft)... but I'd encourage you to > create this Prolog-based build system in your free time over the next > few months [perhaps use the time you'd otherwise be writing rants > about Maven, you'll have it built in no time :)] and if "the > community" decides it is a superior system for building Java (and > other language) applications, the forces of natural selection and > evolution will win out and Maven will die a quiet death at the hands > of your Prolog-builder. > > PS- What's the fascination with Prolog? Do you own patents in Prolog > and get paid every time someone compiles or runs a Prolog > application... or merely mentions it in an email? :D > > Wayne > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] > For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
