[brettmjohnson]

What seems like a lifetime ago, I was taking graduate CS classes at my local University. I had been writing software professionally for more than 20 years, so I was atypical in my class.

We were given some assignment to write a mail server in Java. At the time, I had never used Java, but had decades of experience with other dialects of C, so I taught myself Java over the weekend.

I put together the server, as well as several classes that could be shared by the client and presented it to the team on the following tuesday. When I showed them java code in emacs, with a Makefile to compile it all and jar it up, they were astonished. They didn't believe that:

1) I had learned the fundamentals of a language in a couple of days and was producing professional quality code in that language (actually professional quality design).

2) That I could do it outside of some java-specific IDE, using 20 year old tools.

I learned Java over a weekend; I wasn't about to tackle ANT at the same time.

After years of using ANT, I still think it is a pain in the ass.