Amper approach towards a declarative build tool, moving away from kotlin script (and gradle) is very sound. A while ago there was a debate in the Scala community about sbt which describes a project in a subset of scala. Using a well-know DSL to describe a project will offer better tooling support. I hope that Amper will be a modern version of maven (minus the XML, and the plugins) I think that Rust's cargo should be the benchmark for Amper. Simple, fast, powerful.

Thanks for feedback!