[lmm]

What abstractions? You have a project which has a name and some other metadata and it has a bunch of dependencies. If your build does something weird then it also has plugins, but you should try to avoid those as much as possible. I guess profiles could be confusing, but again, try to avoid them. Maven is the simplest build tool I've used, in any language.

[mike_hearn]

Maven has a lot of jargon. I also found it confusing when I started. POMS, artifacts, plugins, reactors etc ... heck I still find Maven confusing and unintuitive sometimes. Their docs are awful: typical failure mode for software that's in love with the idea of plugins.

[eshvk]

Exactly. With Make, I can delve down into the bash code easily and figure out what is happening. With Maven, there is enough overhead that I have to resort to cargo-cult googling.