Ant user here. Ant is Turing-complete, which serves as an object lesson in "can" versus "should". I have actually had cause to program in Ant - because that was the right place for the complexity in question - and would characterise it as what COBOL would look like written as correctly-formed XML. Oh the verbosity!

To be fair, I'm doing things that are actually bad and wrong. (At which point ant-contrib is your last friend.) Ant does its actual job - makefiles for Java - pretty well once you know it. It's fine, y'know, probably pretty much complete.

Here's Netflix Exhibitor (which I wrote): https://github.com/Netflix/exhibitor - the developer who wrote the build scripts did an incredible job. I'm very impressed. However, I don't comprehend it. Note: this was previously in Maven and had exactly 3 POM files.

Thanks for the link.

To my eyes, the build scripts are pretty clear. I like the way the scripts are nicely organized using 'apply'. Maybe the only script that may look complex to someone starting with gradle is 'convention.gradle', but again, nothing impossibly hard to grasp for a developer.

No at all clear to me. You think https://github.com/Netflix/exhibitor/blob/master/gradle/rele... is clear? What about https://github.com/Netflix/exhibitor/blob/master/gradle/lice...? What is "ext.year"? I don't want to learn and understand an entirely new language for my build.

I am not able to maintain these build scripts. This is the problem with DSLs in general. Maven isn't great, but its strength is standardization. I can look at any Maven pom and know what it does and make changes to it.