I have lately been pondering the benefits of using project build tools such as make or Ant. Granted, this is not of immediate import to Perl, since there's no such thing as a perlc required for us to fiddle with, Thank Larry!

However, what I found myself doing in a hurry the other day was writing a project build script using Perl. This wasn't the first time either, which made me start chanting the Laziness is a Virtue mantra again...

And so it was, looking back on a long & mostly fruitful history of projects that apparently I had cobbled together using such things as make (most often), and then on occasion smatterings of shell scripts (always sh for compatability, though at the CMDline I use bash or tcsh for convenience..) , Ant a few times recently, and lots-O-hacked Perl code with system calls galone; meditating upon this I had a minor epiphany..

Thinking about how lovely it is to see something like the CPAN module in action determining system characteristics to adapt to perform an installation properly, I'm thinking Why would I use anything other than Perl?

Now I could have put this under Cool New Uses for Perl or under SoPW, but as a meditation I feel it's more of an opinion thing..

In the end I'm sure we all end us using What Works For Us anyway, but for the sake of conjecture, what are we monks using for project build scripts in Java, C, C++, C#(ack!), etc..? And wouldn't Perl be a more standardized way of implementing that (assuming you used modules rather than my bad example)?

Wait! This isn't a Parachute, this is a Backpack!