Ant (and yeah the ecosystem has moved moved on since you left) is obviously not an interpreter and was never intended to be one. Neither are the more currently

Ant (and yeah the ecosystem has moved moved on since you left) is obviously not an interpreter and was never intended to be one. Neither are the more currently popular build tools. Nothing prevents anyone from writing their Java builds in, say, Python (shelling out to javac when needed) but no one does and with a good reason.