Classic WTF: An Ant Pushes a Perl
by in CodeSOD on 2024-05-27It's a holiday in the US today, so as per tradition, we reach back through the archives. Today is a classic of code generation gone horribly, horribly wrong. Original. --Remy
It’s an old joke that Perl is a “write only language”. Despite some of its issues, back in the early 2000s, Perl was one of the best options out there for scripting languages and rapid-development automation.
Speaking of automation, build automation is really important. Back in the early 2000s, before Maven really caught on, your build automation tool for Java was Ant. Ant, like everything invented in the early 2000s, was driven by an XML scripting tool. Since it was tuned specifically for Java, it had some high-level operations to streamline tasks like generating proxy classes for calling web services based on a supplied WSDL file.