buildr combines the advantages of maven with the advantages of being built on top of rake and scales to managing multiple projects. Groovy's Grails build system and Scala's sbt also both look good to me, although I have not yet taken the time to try them. The only reason I can think of why systems like buildr aren't more popular than maven is that most Java developers appear too unwilling to learn a separate programming language and would instead rather torture themselves coding in painful XML-based DSL's like Maven.
I'm sorry to disagree with you but some people would rather invest their time to learn how to use Maven more effectively than to learn another programming language _and_ a new build system altogether.
"No knowledge of Ruby is assumed. Buildr is designed to be a very intuitive, very easy-to-use tool. You can create buildfiles which describe incredibly intricate projects, write custom tasks which do things far beyond Ant, and still never need to pick up more than a smattering of Ruby syntax."
Also, learning a new programming language isn't exactly a waste of time. When I learned Ruby it made me a far better Java programmer, for instance.
I think it depends. Is learning a new programming language a waste of time compare to getting better with the current programming language that you knew already?
While I'm learning Ruby, it did not make me a better Java programmer. I still suck at Java programming.
Reading books like Code Complete, Pragmatic Programmer, Clean Code, and reading Zen of Python (import this) help me to become a better programmer; but learning Python does not help me to become a better developer. Reading better code (other people's or projects's) do make me know more.
I finally understand what does it mean with the phrase "no matter what they tell you, it's always a people problem.". Languages have nothing to do with it.
Ruby introduced me to the ideas of first class functions, closures, and higher order functions and the design patterns that can be easily implemented using them. These same patterns can be implemented in Java, albeit with a much more verbose syntax. Most Java programmers are unaware of even these basic functional concepts and it shows because they end up copy-pasting a lot of code they don't have to and writing silly functions that can be easily implemented in terms of functions like map, filter, and reduce.
Yes, learning a new language can and does make you a better programmer if it introduces new concepts you can apply to other languages.
