Hm... I had the same impression when I was startin...

# announcements

[Czar]

Hm... I had the same impression when I was starting out with gradle, but eventually, when I learned, it became much easier and more readable for me personally to write gradle build files instead of pom.xml

[voddan]

@Czar Could you recommend some eye-opening learning materials on Gradle? Their docs suck

[Czar]

Not really, I use combination of docs, api docs and source digging, sometimes even just googling for "how to blah in gradle" :) And I'm far from being an expert, but gradle does everything I need and does it in a more clear and readable way than maven, and I don't need to write a plugin each time when I want a bit of custom behavior, I also dislike working with XML. All this is personal choices and attitude though.

[voddan]

Build files are the only place when I prefer easily writable code to easily readable code. Sometimes I think that the main measure of success for Gradle people is the number of SO question about Gradle 😢

[Czar]

Maybe my builds are comparatively simple, but I have yet to encounter such problems, for last several years the only major problem I had was translating groovy-dsl to kotlin-dsl, but that was to be expected with a new and unfinished feature, the rest just works for me 🙂 But again I don't need anything fancy from gradle, some plugins, some code generation, some custom project scanning, that's it.

[Czar]

With maven on the other hand I always had problems and almost always had to find source of the plugins I was using because of sub-par documentation and [seemingly] poor design. There is another explanation though, I am [hopefully] much better developer than I was in the days past when I was using maven.