[lantry]

My favorite thing about gradle is that the build file is written in the same language as your code. This gives you the great power of easily adding a little hack into your build file, so it's pretty rare you actually have to make a plugin.

The downside is that every build file is a little bit unique, but IME it's not that much worse than what happens in golang. In golang people usually slap a makefile on top of the go commands, and then you have to read the makefile to figure out what targets you need to run, and if it gets a little complicated then they start calling out to shell scripts and things like that. ech.