What seems like a lifetime ago, I was taking graduate CS classes at my local University. I had been writing software professionally for more than 20 years, so I was atypical in my class.

We were given some assignment to write a mail server in Java. At the time, I had never used Java, but had decades of experience with other dialects of C, so I taught myself Java over the weekend.

I put together the server, as well as several classes that could be shared by the client and presented it to the team on the following tuesday. When I showed them java code in emacs, with a Makefile to compile it all and jar it up, they were astonished. They didn't believe that:

1) I had learned the fundamentals of a language in a couple of days and was producing professional quality code in that language (actually professional quality design).

2) That I could do it outside of some java-specific IDE, using 20 year old tools.

I learned Java over a weekend; I wasn't about to tackle ANT at the same time.

After years of using ANT, I still think it is a pain in the ass.

There's something to be said for relatively simple tool like make. It can be a lot easier to understand what's going on with Make because it eliminates the layers of stuff between the build script and the actual commands that are run. That's not to say that it's possible to write inscrutable Makefiles.

Java presents a lot of problems for make (multiple classes from a single java file, JNI produced files, circular class references, package to package dependencies).

Make definitely got itself a bad reputation - and in my opinion, undeservingly so.

It can be a bit difficult, but I have written readable Makefiles that ran both on windows and linux, building latex files.