Maven's HTML/XML-style syntax in dkopi's example...

    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.sakaiproject.edu-services.course-management</groupId>
      <artifactId>course-management</artifactId>
      <version>10.2</version>
    </dependency>

...is equivalent to the Gradle/CSS-style ...

    dependency{
      groupID: "org.sakaiproject.edu-services.course-management"
      artifactId: "course-management"
      version: "10.2"
    }

...via simple syntactic transformations. Of course, IDE's go a step further and automatically generate and parse the whole shebang so the issue of syntax readability is moot if you use an IDE.