Before I continue, I would like to point out that Gradle is so bad that it’s making me say “I’d like to go back to XML please”. In any other context this would

Before I continue, I would like to point out that Gradle is so bad that it’s making me say “I’d like to go back to XML please”. In any other context this would be an insane thing for me to say, but Gradle is that bad. XML & Maven has the benefit of having a schema. This means that not only do all my pom.xml files look similar, but the IDE can do meaningful autocompletion and semantic checking for me. It’s verbose and ugly, but at least it’s consistent and has good tooling. Gradle on the other hand is a Turing complete system, which just adds another layer of potential errors on top of Java compilation, which is the exact opposite of what I wanted. Now also all of my Gradle files are different and I have no idea why, and what the relative pros and cons of each style is. Could Maven be improved? Sure. I’d kill for something like Cargo for Java. But I did not want to find myself debugging by build tool’s state because I used a setter wrong (true story).