Life After Ant

Here's an interesting post on new-age build tools like Rake and Gant.

A moderately new thought (for me) on build tools:

Things that we use _all the time_ tend to resist change. For example, in natural language, the verbs “to be” and “to have” are notoriously weird because they aren’t made “regular”, as is the tendency with less-used verbs. We don't think about "to have" or "to be": we just use them. All the time.

Similarly, build tools have amazing resilience. The industry suffered with ‘make’ for decades. The fact that Ant saved us from ‘make’ is enough for it to go into the Hall of Fame.

I'm in no hurry to see Ant go away. I am intrigued though by Gant.