I find all of them hard to work with, because they are all aiming for the modern day "zero configuration" nirvana that Ruby on Rails achieved, and thus enormous amounts of implicit knowledge is required to understand them.
Part of the problem is that the initial steps are so easy that you're actually never forced to learn the mechanics of what is happening. Hence you get away with a lot until you need to do something there isn't a magic command for. This is also why you see blithe statements that you "don't need to know Groovy to use Gradle", etc. However these are only said after the fact when you've learned Gradle, understood enough Groovy to intuit what it's doing and then retrospectively realised there is a theoretical path from ignorance to enlightenment that didn't involve learning Groovy.
What you would probably like is Gant, which is Ant entirely converted to Groovy. It's missing all the higher level project stuff from Maven / Gradle, but it works a treat when you just want the simplest possible thing that could work.
> I find all of them hard to work with, because they are all aiming for the modern day "zero configuration" nirvana that Ruby on Rails achieved, and thus enormous amounts of implicit knowledge is required to understand them.
> ... realised there is a theoretical path from ignorance to enlightenment that didn't involve learning Groovy.
Yes! Learning is so non-linear that sure there are in theory fine lines that minimize the amount of new stuff to learn. Yet, it never is that simple. Bad design, indeed.
> What you would probably like is Gant, which is Ant entirely converted to Groovy. It's missing all the higher level project stuff from Maven / Gradle, but it works a treat when you just want the simplest possible thing that could work.
Part of the problem is that the initial steps are so easy that you're actually never forced to learn the mechanics of what is happening. Hence you get away with a lot until you need to do something there isn't a magic command for. This is also why you see blithe statements that you "don't need to know Groovy to use Gradle", etc. However these are only said after the fact when you've learned Gradle, understood enough Groovy to intuit what it's doing and then retrospectively realised there is a theoretical path from ignorance to enlightenment that didn't involve learning Groovy.
What you would probably like is Gant, which is Ant entirely converted to Groovy. It's missing all the higher level project stuff from Maven / Gradle, but it works a treat when you just want the simplest possible thing that could work.