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> During my period of intense frustration with Gradle I found this condescending blog post claiming that anyone who dislikes it is simply using it wrong. Repla

> During my period of intense frustration with Gradle I found this condescending blog post claiming that anyone who dislikes it is simply using it wrong. Replace Gradle with literally any tech tool and you'll find the same articles. A hill that I'll gladly die on is that Git sucks, maybe more than any other tool so widely adopted, and yet bringing up how badly it sucks usually results in a deluge of downvotes and "No! You don't understand! Just learn the internals of the tool!" and "Oh yeah well if it's so bad, what do you suggest?!" I reject this sentiment. I don't have to have all the answers to point out that something sucks. I also shouldn't be expected to learn the inner workings of a tool that we expect code school students to use. > But that’s stupid. When I took a step back I realized that all of the problems I had with Gradle before still existed, I just understood how to use them to get work done. But the fundamental problem with Gradle is that it simply does not justify these complexities. Yep. Spot on. > But goddam it feels like there must be an easier way to accomplish this stuff. I've done multiple forays into Java and always fall into the trap of "Certainly in <insert year> java tooling must not suck as bad?" but I come up empty. It still sucks. A real mess. I really enjoyed this blog post.

fbdab103 4y ago
I am just smirking that within seven minutes, the git supporters are appearing.
- dvh 4y ago
  Git may suck but it suck fast! Alternatives sucks as well but are also slow.
henry2023 4y ago
Curious question: why do you think git sucks? From my perspective is one of the fundamental tools behind modern software engineering. brilliantly designed and yet so simple to use. I’ll even go ahead of myself to believe you’d be able to make a successful tech company just providing a “git for X” where X is another industry
- jgable 4y ago
  Allspice - git platform for hardware engineers https://www.allspice.io/ https://www.allspice.io/
  - alex_lav 4y ago
    > git platform immediate unsubscribe :)
- sodapopcan 4y ago
  Mostly the UX is inconsistent. Git Koans [0], which is now 10 years old, still holds mostly true. I do feel it has improved, though not in ways I've bothered to use. `git switch` for example, was introduced at, uh, some point because `checkout` is so overloaded. Anyway, git was the first and only VCS I ever learned so I don't really see the big deal myself. I didn't learn all the internals super well, but I generally did just learned it. On the same token I've never really heard of a VCS that people don't complain about. Except Mercurial. [0] https://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/ https://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/
  - alex_lav 4y ago
    > I've never really heard of a VCS that people don't complain about. Just noting that this is unrelated to a piece of software being good. People complain about tools that're A.) crappy and/or B.) Widely used.
    - sodapopcan 4y ago
      true!
- jcranmer 4y ago
  Of the DVCS systems that came out at around the same time (hg, git, and bzr all came out within a month or two of each other), I would probably rate git the worst. The most notable issue with git is that it's help is... anti-helpful. It is pretty jargon-filled, and there have been numerous moments where reading a help page has left me actively more confused about what a git command is doing. Of course, part of the reason why the help is so unhelpful is because git's UX is poorly designed. When even the help page has to admit that a command actually does three different things depending on parameters, you know it's bad. I'll also point out that I've seen far more repository corruption issues with git than I have with any other VCS (and I've used CVS). Accidentally torching your data is quite easy in git, and appreciate the irony of an immutable store of data needing a garbage collector for the data it's storing. Something like Mercurial's changeset evolution and phases is far, far saner for development than working with branches in git.
lmm 4y ago
> Replace Gradle with literally any tech tool and you'll find the same articles. A hill that I'll gladly die on is that Git sucks, maybe more than any other tool so widely adopted, and yet bringing up how badly it sucks usually results in a deluge of downvotes and "No! You don't understand! Just learn the internals of the tool!" and "Oh yeah well if it's so bad, what do you suggest?!" The difference is that Gradle has an obvious better alternative: Maven. The thing that Gradle does better than Maven is that it makes quick hacks easy. But once you try to use Gradle in a "proper" maintainable way, as this article does, you discover that all the things that annoyed you about Maven were there for a reason and you have to essentially reimplement the same things in Gradle. And then, if you have any sense, you go back to Maven.
- alex_lav 4y ago
  > The difference is that Gradle has an obvious better alternative: Maven. I do not find Maven to be an obvious improvement. I would say it's equally bad.
- justoreply 4y ago
  With Maven I can't have a distributed build cache or multi-project caching
  - lmm 4y ago
    Yeah maybe. But I've found cache problems have always ended up costing more time than the cache ever saves.
    - wiseowise 4y ago
      Yeah, you haven’t worked on projects big enough.
      - lmm 4y ago
        I worked on what was claimed to be the second-biggest scala codebase in the world - 10MLOC, 500 contributors. Of course just switching off caching with 0 other workflow changes doesn't work, but I remain convinced that transparent caching does more harm than good.

fbdab103 4y ago

I am just smirking that within seven minutes, the git supporters are appearing.

dvh 4y ago
Git may suck but it suck fast! Alternatives sucks as well but are also slow.

henry2023 4y ago

Curious question: why do you think git sucks? From my perspective is one of the fundamental tools behind modern software engineering. brilliantly designed and yet so simple to use. I’ll even go ahead of myself to believe you’d be able to make a successful tech company just providing a “git for X” where X is another industry

jgable 4y ago
Allspice - git platform for hardware engineers https://www.allspice.io/ https://www.allspice.io/
- alex_lav 4y ago
  > git platform immediate unsubscribe :)
sodapopcan 4y ago
Mostly the UX is inconsistent. Git Koans [0], which is now 10 years old, still holds mostly true. I do feel it has improved, though not in ways I've bothered to use. `git switch` for example, was introduced at, uh, some point because `checkout` is so overloaded. Anyway, git was the first and only VCS I ever learned so I don't really see the big deal myself. I didn't learn all the internals super well, but I generally did just learned it. On the same token I've never really heard of a VCS that people don't complain about. Except Mercurial. [0] https://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/ https://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/
- alex_lav 4y ago
  > I've never really heard of a VCS that people don't complain about. Just noting that this is unrelated to a piece of software being good. People complain about tools that're A.) crappy and/or B.) Widely used.
  - sodapopcan 4y ago
    true!
jcranmer 4y ago
Of the DVCS systems that came out at around the same time (hg, git, and bzr all came out within a month or two of each other), I would probably rate git the worst. The most notable issue with git is that it's help is... anti-helpful. It is pretty jargon-filled, and there have been numerous moments where reading a help page has left me actively more confused about what a git command is doing. Of course, part of the reason why the help is so unhelpful is because git's UX is poorly designed. When even the help page has to admit that a command actually does three different things depending on parameters, you know it's bad. I'll also point out that I've seen far more repository corruption issues with git than I have with any other VCS (and I've used CVS). Accidentally torching your data is quite easy in git, and appreciate the irony of an immutable store of data needing a garbage collector for the data it's storing. Something like Mercurial's changeset evolution and phases is far, far saner for development than working with branches in git.

lmm 4y ago

> Replace Gradle with literally any tech tool and you'll find the same articles. A hill that I'll gladly die on is that Git sucks, maybe more than any other tool so widely adopted, and yet bringing up how badly it sucks usually results in a deluge of downvotes and "No! You don't understand! Just learn the internals of the tool!" and "Oh yeah well if it's so bad, what do you suggest?!" The difference is that Gradle has an obvious better alternative: Maven. The thing that Gradle does better than Maven is that it makes quick hacks easy. But once you try to use Gradle in a "proper" maintainable way, as this article does, you discover that all the things that annoyed you about Maven were there for a reason and you have to essentially reimplement the same things in Gradle. And then, if you have any sense, you go back to Maven.

alex_lav 4y ago
> The difference is that Gradle has an obvious better alternative: Maven. I do not find Maven to be an obvious improvement. I would say it's equally bad.
justoreply 4y ago
With Maven I can't have a distributed build cache or multi-project caching
- lmm 4y ago
  Yeah maybe. But I've found cache problems have always ended up costing more time than the cache ever saves.
  - wiseowise 4y ago
    Yeah, you haven’t worked on projects big enough.
    - lmm 4y ago
      I worked on what was claimed to be the second-biggest scala codebase in the world - 10MLOC, 500 contributors. Of course just switching off caching with 0 other workflow changes doesn't work, but I remain convinced that transparent caching does more harm than good.