For the last few months, I've ben away from the Ruby land, doing first a Java and now a .NET project. I also had to write a few hundred lines of Python. Hold on with condolences - it wasn't a bad thing at all. I actually loved the opportunity to tinker with other mainstream platforms and see how things are there these days. Besides, JetBrains makes wonderful tools. Besides, next time someone tells me Rails has too much magic, I'll be laughing - compared to Spring/Hibernate? - give me a break! But I digress.This is to report that recent Java/.NET experience has GREATLY improved my appreciation of the usefulness, maintainability and sheer beauty of a well-written Rake build. A build in a real programing language is AWESOME. It is my [now well-informed] opinion that this is one of the things corporate IT sector should learn in the build/deployment area - replace Ant and MSBuild with tools that use real programming languages for expressing the build logic. I.e., Rake or similar.Why would you want to do it? Here is an example. On the aforementioned Java project we needed to include a piece of logic into the build that would behave roughly as follows:* Grab build artefacts for a specified build from Cruise* Copy them to one or several servers (one for test environments, several for production)* Unpack some of them on the target box(-es)* Flip the symlinks* Gracefully handle a failure of any step* Be mindful about the fact that the target environment may or may not be a cluster.This task was handled by a fellow ThoughtWorker , very smart guy with substantial platform experience in the Java land. Since the client asked us to avoid introducing too many alien artifacts, he did it all in Ant. As far as I remember, it took something like two days to sort it all out. The last two bullet points proved particularly hard. Apparently (and what a surprise!), XML is not the best way to describe loops and conditional statements.Certain parts of the solution were a great laugh (of a bitter/cynical variety). The Daily WTF doesn't have a Hall of Fame, but if it did, this stuff should be featured there. Once again, we are talking about a very smart guy - many programmers could not even find a way to do it, I suspect.If we were not constrained in the choice of tools, we would go for Rake Vlad , and be done with it in under two hours, conservatively speaking - been there, done that. Overall, I think that a Rake build for that project (fairly straightforward Java web app), would be four to five times smaller, an equivalent number of times cheaper to create, and noticeably easier to maintain, too, despite being an alien artifact for the support team. Benefits of using Ant (which supposedly makes it easier to compile a bunch of Java classes and make a war file out of them) proved imaginary as soon as we started addressing automated deployment requirements.Two days extra work is not such a big deal, if it is just an isolated incident - but it wasn't. Couple of days here, a day there - these costs do accumulate. By the way, before anyone asks - yes, we did look into Maven 2. Outcome: it's quite possible to coerce me into using Ant for another Java project, but I would flatly refuse to touch Maven with a ten feet pole - consultant ethics demand it. And yes, I do have logical arguments to support this position with. It just isn't the subject of my post.If memory serves, it's been 5 or 6 years since the creator of Ant publicly stated that programming in angled brackets was a bad idea. And for at least five years we have some great alternatives to it coming from the dynamic languages community. These things are neither new, nor unproven anymore. They offer very tangible benefits - that's the point. Once you know about these alternatives, the only real reason to continue using Ant (or Nant, or MSBuild) for any build that goes beyond "compile and run unit tests" is inertia. Which, up to some point, is a perfectly good reason - new shiny toys tend to have nasty flipside. But that point for switching from things like Ant to things like Rake is past us, in this pundit's opinion. Question is, when are we, as an industry, finally going to do it?