[tmtvl]

I'm by-and-large fine with XML, having used it for many a year; however I really like working with XML when I can use Guile's SXML layer. For Maven it's not that important because POMs are simple enough, but for more complex things it's nice having a useful tool.

I actually don't mind Ant very much, but I haven't had good luck using Ivy for dependency management. Maven's been very nice in the decade and a half I've used it, Gradle's always felt off to me. I think there was also another Java build tool written in like Ruby or something, but I'm blanking on the name at the moment.

[pjmlp]

Before Maven came to be, we had built nice macros on our Ant builds that were quite similar to how Maven works, but Ivy wasn't also around.

Eventually Maven grew on me, however I would rather go back to Ant than deal with Gradle, the time using it when I did Android development a few years ago, was more than enough.