> For starters, you can see Groovy as "Java without semicolons"
Not if you have to read other people's code, or understand examples you find on the internet.
> I went from Maven to Gradle and never looked back. It's superior in most ways.
What's it better at? I want my build tool to be simple; maven compiles my source and does my releases, and the main thing I have to configure is just a list of dependencies (in an admittedly verbose format). I'm actually a scala programmer, but I use maven rather than SBT because it seems to me that having lots of logic in the build system could only lead to bad things. So what are the things you see it helping with?
See my reply to vorg regarding Groovy. As a developer the argument "I don't want to learn something new" is invalid.
Gradle offers the declarative nature of Maven without pushing it down your throat. You don't have to write a plugin for something that can be expressed in 3 lines of Groovy (but you can, if you want to!). Instead of adapting your build to Gradle, Gradle adapts to your needs. That's often a point of criticism from Maven users, because every Gradle build looks different. But that's the point: Everyones needs are different. Of course that only applies if your build is beyond the standard compile/test/release configuration. A simple configuration looks pretty much like a Maven POM (minus the tag soup).
Not if you have to read other people's code, or understand examples you find on the internet.
> I went from Maven to Gradle and never looked back. It's superior in most ways.
What's it better at? I want my build tool to be simple; maven compiles my source and does my releases, and the main thing I have to configure is just a list of dependencies (in an admittedly verbose format). I'm actually a scala programmer, but I use maven rather than SBT because it seems to me that having lots of logic in the build system could only lead to bad things. So what are the things you see it helping with?