Martin Fowler's Bliki: BuildLanguage: "Since I do a fair bit of programming in Ruby, I've naturally started to play with Rake, a ruby make. The interesting thing about the rakefiles is that they are regular ruby programs with a few conventions and support to allow you to declare tasks and dependencies. I only have small tasks to work with it, and so far I find it very comfortable. Since it is a full blown programming language I would expect it to work well for larger builds, I already have found it handy to do things like loops, subroutines and list collection in my build files."