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Comment by jacobn | Hacker News Reader

Why do I have to learn a second programming language just to configure my build? /s

Builds need Turing completeness surprisingly often. Build languages then expand to accommodate, with spaghetti disasters as the result.

“But it has to be accessible to new users and can’t be tied to just one language” said SBT as it jumped the shark with its .sbt files.

Sigh.

Developers get crap tools because developers won’t pay for tooling - if it’s not open source and free we don’t touch it outside of an enterprise environment. And Lo and behold, most tooling is either cobbled together by Enthusiasts, or as user friendly as enterprise ware usually is.

(There are, of course, shining exceptions to this, which is great)

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The problem of tooling is that that's the place where ugly hacks most often go. Where the beautiful elegant abstractions meet the reality, where third party dependency cruft seeps in, where cross-version compilation gets orchestrated, where all the dev/test/prod compile time configuration, optimization, obfuscation, etc. happens.

And sbt is just bad all around on top of all this, and it should feel bad.

> crap tools because developers won’t pay for tooling

I'm not sure i understand this argument

crap Linux because developers won’t pay for Linux

crap git because developers won’t pay for git

...that's clearly not the case, no? Every day we use a bunch of developer tools that are not just crap, but amazing and great to work with, and were built as open source. So I'm not sure about equating open source with crap experience.

What’s frustrating is seeing new communities and languages make unforced errors that a review of prior mistakes should easy uncover. The lack of a unified, coherent build tool in Java was a huge mistake. New languages would be well advised to focus on good tooling right out of the gate, rather than putting it off until later.

At the very least, limit the scope of the language until a standardized toolset is cross-functional. I'm not not throwing shade at UWP right now.

Maven has never really been displaced - Gradle only has traction in Android dev, for some reason it became the blessed-by-Google solution.

Even when I'm writing Scala I prefer Maven to SBT, I just prefer declarative build tools to DSLs up in my grill.

In my limited experience, Gradle is increasingly popular for Spring Boot applications.

> if it’s not open source and free we don’t touch it outside of an enterprise environment.

To be fair, this is due also to the fact that opensource tools are mostly guaranteed to outlive their developers. Should Microsoft go bankrupt tomorrow (don't laugh, it basically happened to SUN), most of their traditional tooling would disappear. In contrast, Gcc might be old and crusty, but it will go on forever like a cockroach.

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