These friendly high abstraction build systems show their teeth when they meet configurations that deviate from abstractions. Go's a great example -- if $GOROOT

These friendly high abstraction build systems show their teeth when they meet configurations that deviate from abstractions. Go's a great example -- if $GOROOT or parts of $GOPATH are not owned by the build user, "go build" will occasionally fail because a pacman or aptitude update touched the compiler and Go needs to recompile every package in sight. When dealing with JNI, both Maven and SBT have to delegate the task to less pure build systems. For projects that cannot nest nicely above a very high and consistent layer of abstraction, these "archaic" systems are essential because of their lack of interfering abstractions. They observe a different definition of "simple", instead of being "simple to use in a specific problem domain" they go to "simple to adapt to a different problem domain."