January 04, 2006
Syntactic Sugar
I usually spend the last half hour of work reading blogs related to my job. Even though I am not currently using Ruby or Rails I am still trying to keep up. I am also not doing much java (other than ant tasks) so I don't worry too much about it - Java is Java, and I am trying to get farther from it every day.
But, in reading blogs, it seems that I can't go even 1 day without reading the phrase "syntactic sugar". It seems to be the newest catch phrase, and it is beginning to annoy me. Also, I am not sure why so many people feel there shouldn't be such a thing.
People, if syntactic sugar makes my life easier, I am all for it. I really don't care if the compile takes another minute - ant and vulcan are managing that for me anyway. If you want to go back to barebones languages, I am sure we can find a PDP-11 somewhere for you.
One of our junior programmers today suggested that smart people had already solved the standardized build project. Hell, some of us have solved it 3 or 4 times. But each company has tradition and rules. A standardized build for Treasury is different from a standardized build for the small piece of DOD I am working for. Among other things, they solve different problems. And you have different big feet around that you don't want to step on. I still prefer my old build to the one I am now using, but I have to respect their work and build on it - not destroy it.
By the way, one of our really really FANTASTIC programmers has written a replacement for anthill/cruisecontrol. I am just getting used to it - it is excellent. Go look at Vulcan on sourceforge.
In other news, I have been doing almost nothing but ant for a few weeks. Ant sucks as a scripting language (as it should). I am still considering moving some of the scripting over to Ruby, but I have managed with Ant this long - I have just been informed that we simply don't have the time for me to refactor. The one project that should be done by march has turned into 13. Most of them are exactly alike (and we have a backup), but I am getting a bit concerned.
Posted by liz at 04:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 10, 2005
Ant
Yah, it has been a while, but I have been doing all sorts of stuff. Right now I am concentrating on ant. I wouldn't be concentrating on ant if import could be used within a target (why can't it). I was generating a file that needs to be imported. Unfortunately, if the file isn't there, you can't compile. I want this to be a single button thing, so now my ant task (which worked just fine thank you) has to generate a path.
All of this will help me when I start my next story - I have 3 projects right now, the next story is the first story in the second project. The ant stuff I am doing now could go opensource (it is a replacement for the eclipseclasspath plugin). The next stuff is DOD, so I probably will not be blogging about it.
I got two books on ant. Luckily, the O'Reilly book has been updated. I am taking notes for a possible book. I am a smart person - and it is not easy for me to figure out path oriented tasks.
Posted by liz at 09:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack