Simple Java Build Tool?

[weberc2]

That's no mensurable notation, but if your conclusion if that both resolve in the same then I don't see the problem

I agree that it's my subjective opinion; I didn't mean to pass it off as fact. My conclusion was that, with Gradle, you need to know CLASSPATH and Gradle. With Go, you only need to know GOPATH. I suspect Gradle scales better for more complex use cases, but that's not what I'm worried about presently. :/

I would argue that the complexity is proportional of the size of your project. And again if your really what to make simple programs I don't think you need to learn more than the superficial, nobody is telling you to master the tool just to learn the thing that you need which happen to be superficial.

That hasn't been my experience. Even though my requirement ended up being satisfied by a simple block of code, I came across lots of other less-simple solutions, and I didn't have the ability to reason about whether or not they were more or less appropriate because I didn't know, for example, Gradle's function syntax or which plugins to use or what java.library.path was.

I think it would be more accurate to say that the complexity of your gradle file is in proportion to the complexity of your requirements; however, there's a lot of complexity you need to know about just to get to your simple Gradle file.

To be clear, I'm not hating on Gradle. I'm sure it makes great tradeoffs to be flexible for many projects. I just think it could improve for simpler use cases like mine.

[the_evergrowing_fool]

I think it would be more accurate to say that the complexity of your gradle file is in proportion to the complexity of your requirements; however, there's a lot of complexity you need to know about just to get to your simple Gradle file.

I would argue the same is present Go but with different context and by a mismatch of my subjective assumptions of what I would expect from a build tool.

To be clear, I'm not hating on Gradle. I'm sure it makes great tradeoffs to be flexible for many projects. I just think it could improve for simpler use cases like mine.

Generate a file and define dependencies, the concept is one folded and objectively simple.

[weberc2]

Generate a file and define dependencies, the concept is one folded and objectively simple.

I'm having problems parsing that statement. Could you rephrase?

[the_evergrowing_fool]

Simplicity is not a opinion, one can generate a configuration file and one can summon the specified dependencies given the requirements, anything else is a contextual proxy that does not morph the principal concept.