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by da39a3ee 1730 days ago
Thanks. I have to say, this sounds awful -- it sounds like it will be a huge time sink and an impediment to learning about areas of software engineering that transcend specific languages (say, service orchestration, distributed systems, system architecture patterns, workflows, etc)
1 comments

It is awful.

However it’s not all accidental complexity. To pick a random example, there’s a reason typo squatting is a thing in npm or pypi but not in maven/gradle. The mitigation’s that prevent this are not free, they add complexity (e.g. signing before publication, dns records, immutable packages etc).

But there’s definitely some areas of accidental complexity remain. While gradle CAN be used well (e.g. <3 min build on large code base), the default in large teams seems to resemble a kind of tragedy of the commons. Full of sharp edges and >45 min builds.