I haven't tried to step through Scons, so that may be a system that looks like how I want it to look but fails entirely to deliver on its promises for all I know.
I think there's a place for making a builder that looks imperative, but can work out a tree of actions and run them. Gulp is a little bit this way, but again I haven't tried to breakpoint through it either.
If the next evolution in DevEx is not caring about what your code looks like in a stepping debugger, then the one after it will be. Making libraries that present a tight demo app for the Readme.md file and then are impossible to do anything tricky with or god forbid debug just needs to fucking stop. Yesterday. And declarative systems are almost always the worst.
I think there's a place for making a builder that looks imperative, but can work out a tree of actions and run them. Gulp is a little bit this way, but again I haven't tried to breakpoint through it either.
If the next evolution in DevEx is not caring about what your code looks like in a stepping debugger, then the one after it will be. Making libraries that present a tight demo app for the Readme.md file and then are impossible to do anything tricky with or god forbid debug just needs to fucking stop. Yesterday. And declarative systems are almost always the worst.