Gant crushes XML in poll

CodeToJoy Newswire
St Louis, Missouri
June 2008

Revelers in St Louis were recently polled on their preference for an all purpose build-tool. The choices consisted of:

• Gant, a build-tool which fuses Groovy and Ant
• Traditional build-tools which use XML configuration
  

In a severe blow to XML, Gant dominated the competition. Pundits around the globe noted that this result reflects the groundswell movement toward Gant and other build tools that provide innate, full-blown language capability.

In this montage, CtJ documents many of the votes cast.





When asked if they believed that Gant will usher in a new era of build libraries, some voters, shown below, answered "Dude!" in a tone that implied the answer was obvious.


Members of a local band, Gumbohead, chimed in with their votes, citing pragmatism: "We appreciate the debate between declarative and imperative languages as much as anyone, but at the end of the day, the build is a cornerstone of every project and we need tools that are simple and powerful."


Throughout the evening, there was little support for XML. Said one woman, "XML is fantastic for data exchange but when you need conditional or iterative logic, things just begin to break down."







In the end, Gant carried the day. Some weary XML supporters left the venue, and held their own party in a goth nightclub in another part of the city. They lit candles and used spoken-word sessions to express their angst at being trapped in a world full of angle brackets.