4 ms·

I despise gradle, but Android Studio is well above the "average" point. And as anecdotal evidence, multiple people I know and work with have switched from iOS

by Groxx 10y ago

I despise gradle, but Android Studio is well above the "average" point. And as anecdotal evidence, multiple people I know and work with have switched from iOS to Android or vise versa in just the past few months - they've unanimously preferred Android Studio. A significant part of that is because XCode has loads of magic incantations that you have to perform when it starts flaking out (which it does much more often). Caches to clear, library files to delete, etc, sometimes one works and sometimes another does and it doesn't help you figure it out. XCode has such a problem with mishandled caches that multiple community tools have sprung up to aggressively delete it, e.g.: https://www.cerebralgardens.com/watchdog https://www.cerebralgardens.com/watchdog (and they're still insufficient! they just address the most common annoyance)

astral303 10y ago
Can you please talk about your frustrations with Gradle?
warcher 10y ago
I mean, gradle vs cocoapods... I gotta go with gradle. Yes, it's a new configuratio language to learn, and yes, that is an odious chore, but honestly, if I'm leveraging ecosystem library projects, I don't think I've seen a better compiled alternative (excepting the super mature web ecosystems, of course).
- Groxx 10y ago
  Sure, it's better than nothing. And it does function, and it has (vastly) simplified adding third-party libraries. And there are much worse alternatives. But it's not debuggable. It's not introspectable. When things go wrong, you're left hoping Stack Overflow has a magic piece of copypasta to save you from days of guessing. To integrate with it you practically need to do what Android Studio has - work directly with the Gradle team to expose enough information to custom-build an IDE that can make use of it. It feels like it could've been achieved more simply by other means. Instead we have a truly massive, very slow build system that few understand, and for a long time (including after Android Studio's adoption) didn't support basic, long-standing features of the Java build environment (like "provided"-scope code (common in many languages! arguably universal!) and annotation processors).
- yincrash 10y ago
  Especially compared to the Ant/Maven build system that pre-dated it, gradle feels great and is so much easier to do complicated stuff like different build configurations, etc. I shudder just thinking about Ant.
- vorg 10y ago
  > gradle. Yes, it's a new configuratio language to learn Don't forget Gradle has the choice of 2 languages to use for configuration -- Kotlin and Apache Groovy. If you use Kotlin you get: * full Android Studio support for auto-complete hints because Kotlin is statically typed, and Kotlin and Android Studio are both created by the same company, i.e. Jetbrains. (Groovy is dynamically typed and auto-complete only works 80% of the time.) * Kotlin can also be used to build actual Android apps instead of Java, so you can use the same language for building the app and writing the scripts for builds, tests, etc. (Groovy had Android support added, but 2 yrs ago the programmer who do it was retrenched from VMware and no other business wanted to hire him to continue the work, so it's a bit dated.)
  - warcher 10y ago
    Kotlin has been on my list of new languages to investigate for a minute, just haven't really found a use case for another JVM language that isn't really pushing the envelope. (That's not a dig, it seems like a nicer iteration of java all around, I just don't have many major grievances with java for doing java-y things.)

by Groxx 10y ago

astral303 10y ago

Can you please talk about your frustrations with Gradle?

warcher 10y ago

I mean, gradle vs cocoapods... I gotta go with gradle. Yes, it's a new configuratio language to learn, and yes, that is an odious chore, but honestly, if I'm leveraging ecosystem library projects, I don't think I've seen a better compiled alternative (excepting the super mature web ecosystems, of course).

Groxx 10y ago
Sure, it's better than nothing. And it does function, and it has (vastly) simplified adding third-party libraries. And there are much worse alternatives. But it's not debuggable. It's not introspectable. When things go wrong, you're left hoping Stack Overflow has a magic piece of copypasta to save you from days of guessing. To integrate with it you practically need to do what Android Studio has - work directly with the Gradle team to expose enough information to custom-build an IDE that can make use of it. It feels like it could've been achieved more simply by other means. Instead we have a truly massive, very slow build system that few understand, and for a long time (including after Android Studio's adoption) didn't support basic, long-standing features of the Java build environment (like "provided"-scope code (common in many languages! arguably universal!) and annotation processors).
yincrash 10y ago
Especially compared to the Ant/Maven build system that pre-dated it, gradle feels great and is so much easier to do complicated stuff like different build configurations, etc. I shudder just thinking about Ant.
vorg 10y ago
> gradle. Yes, it's a new configuratio language to learn Don't forget Gradle has the choice of 2 languages to use for configuration -- Kotlin and Apache Groovy. If you use Kotlin you get: * full Android Studio support for auto-complete hints because Kotlin is statically typed, and Kotlin and Android Studio are both created by the same company, i.e. Jetbrains. (Groovy is dynamically typed and auto-complete only works 80% of the time.) * Kotlin can also be used to build actual Android apps instead of Java, so you can use the same language for building the app and writing the scripts for builds, tests, etc. (Groovy had Android support added, but 2 yrs ago the programmer who do it was retrenched from VMware and no other business wanted to hire him to continue the work, so it's a bit dated.)
- warcher 10y ago
  Kotlin has been on my list of new languages to investigate for a minute, just haven't really found a use case for another JVM language that isn't really pushing the envelope. (That's not a dig, it seems like a nicer iteration of java all around, I just don't have many major grievances with java for doing java-y things.)