Unfortunately, maven can get into a state where it will fail to be correct without a clear step first. This never happens with gradle (unless you almost deliber

Unfortunately, maven can get into a state where it will fail to be correct without a clear step first. This never happens with gradle (unless you almost deliberately break something), and correctness is above all else. I often end up defending gradle because I do think that people fail to understand it still (which is partially on gradle, I agree). A build system is basically “just” creating a directed graph. If we want to get to target node X, you just execute every transitive dependency of it. To make it fast, you do it in parallel, and only do work that is not currently up-to-date. Gradle is really good at these “behind-the-scene” steps. The imperative part is only about creating this graph. You can use some imperative code to generate this graph, but otherwise it is completely static, after config phase.