SCons? (Was: Re: XML vs. Lisp S-expressions vs Pythonic indentation readability)

[Andrew Lentvorski]

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.

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.

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.

> 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.  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.

Given your preferences, I would tell you to use Ruby, anyhow.

-a