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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Maven is the best build tool I've used, with any language. You have to really embrace its declarative, convention-over-configuration style, but once you do it's wonderful: just declare the projectId, groupId and version, and any dependencies, and there, you're done.

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I think, SBT is better than Maven. It allows interactive development.

Maven allows interactive development too when using the IDE integration. An IDE is in a better position to have that kind of information and integrate it well (e.g. an IDE can run tests on save without having to watch the filesystem for changes).

SBT is not adequately documented, relies too much on symbol-heavy syntax, and allows arbitrary code in build definitions.

Symbol heavy syntax as opposed to symbol free xml? Could you elaborate?

XML uses three symbols: <, >, and /. And it's a well-known, documented standard. Looking at the last project I depended on, its build.sbt uses :=, %, %%, /, <+=, <<= (in addition to standard Scala symbols like +=, ++=, ++, =>, <=, >=, which an inexperienced developer wouldn't necessarily realise weren't part of SBT's own syntax). That's not an exhaustive list (I've used :+= and :++= as examples in another thread) and I have no idea where to find one. Heck, I've been a professional Scala developer for 5 years and I have literally no idea what <+= or <<= mean.

You forgot &entities;

And there is an oft-documented overuse of custom operators among Scala programmers, however I don't have sufficient expertise to gauge the resulting problems in practice.

> You forgot &entities;

I did; in fairness I don't think I've ever seen one in a maven pom.xml

You should try Cargo

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