Clojure is actually designed as a functional language and not as multi-paradigm as Scala.
Yeah. It was pretty clumsy before it got less clumsy - and it makes me sad because a lot of the graph-based databased technologies glomed onto it pretty early on - and I mostly like where they say they are going. And their base compile Suxxor and they messed up their community with the new compile Python3 style.
I guess Kotlin is cool and clean - which is good. And has no ecosystem - which is bad. But stapling JVM language together for ad-hoc purposes is what we have learned how to do, neh?
For my part, I'm probably going to go back to high performance renderers and embedded systems. Like the man said bad in the day: "You can all go to hell - I am going to Texas". (Unfortunately I have been there for 30 years since I learned that I hate it.
I recently worked on a Java 11/Spring app and there is still plenty of pain in Java to go around when compared to other, more terse languages.
I've used the build tools of almost all the major languages (JS/TS, Rust, Haskell, Kotlin, C etc) and I don't honestly see any which are particularly easy.
I would definitely agree with your point that most build tools aren't easy! I've used maven and grumbled about it, and I'm mostly sold on scripting my build in the same language I'm using anyway, but in my long time on the JVM, it's always been the gradle and sbt projects that end up with inscrutable and hard-to-follow build scripts.
The sbt REPL also regularly breaks existing build scripts by changing how args are passed/parsed, or even how terminal color support works, and I just get sad every time I see a new, unexpected error from one of our CI runs.
Take for example the point on syntax - is gradles groovy receiver syntax not just as esoteric as operator overloading?
My question was what makes SBT uniquely bad when the topic of build tooling comes up that people immediately comment how terrible it is.
I even went to a lot of effort to master SBT. I've read through the official docs numerous times, and Josh Suereth's Book https://www.manning.com/books/sbt-in-action, and I still feel like I don't grasp it very well. I'm just not smart enough for SBT.