<@U3D0A5GP9> I once managed to build &amp; run "He...

# getting-started

[karelpeeters]

@poohbar I once managed to build & run "Hello World" using javac, then I tried gradle and never looked back. Don't tell me there are people that actually compile their code manually?

[poohbar]

sure there are... and most actually move into an IDE project set up before moving onto Gradle/Maven

[poohbar]

by that I mean adding JARs in UI in Eclipse or IntelliJ

[karelpeeters]

Hah I never actually got the Idea one to work with dependencies.

[fred.deschenes]

I think I might've called javac directly like... once, years ago

[poohbar]

it takes a bit of fiddling around in the Project Structure and few "Rebuilds" to make it work

[harmony]

only time I've used javac was in school when we were supposed to use it

[roberto.guerra]

I used javac for a while. Maven was hard to pick up and I already had a defined workflow. For beginners, learning maven along with a new language and ecosystem is daunting and not straightforward. This is the case for all languages running on top of the jvm. I find that learning the tools is always the most frustrating part of building a project with a new jvm language.

[poohbar]

I agree Roberto. There is quite a lot compiled language ecosystem with much lower barrier of entry compared to Kotlin.

On a different note. I wish I understood the appeal of Gradle. I don't like the wordy XML syntax of Maven but it just works and the integration to IntelliJ seems to work better. I hate the wrapper cruft Gradle generates and I find Groovy too complicated for config files. I even prefer npm with its package.json over Gradle.

[karelpeeters]

@poohbar Well the wrapper is nice in that it just allows one to clone a repository and build it straight away without any versioning problems. The idea integration is good enough in my opinion, just press refresh every so ofter. If you don't like groovy you can actually switch to Kotlin as a build language.

[poohbar]

The wrapper is everything but nice. I don't expect that the project will be built by anyone without the actual build tool. Why should that be a requirement! It's just noise to me.

Yeah I have to rebuild manually the project several times before it starts picking up new dependencies properly even with auto-import on.

Kotlin is not better IMO. I don't think build files should use fully featured programming languages at all.

I would like something like Maven written in YAML, which I guess is doable with maven-polyglot

[alwyn]

Maven plugins used to be written jelly, now that was not fun.