Because Maven doesn't require a background daemon eating 2GB of memory to be fast and IDEs can actually provide code completion and documentation while typing.

Android is the only reason to have to put up with Gradle.

Gradle 5 lets you write the build scripts in Kotlin, which is supposed to address the code completion issue. (And the continuous build mode is a nice feature!)

But, yes, is does use a lot of memory.

So I have to use additionally 2GB, adopt yet another programming language, to get back what Maven already gives me out of the box?

Eclipse and Netbeans compile on file save, can't get more continuous than that.

Fair enough. It doesn't sell me on switching back to Maven. Ram is cheap enough. With 32GB Gradle can have a couple if it wants.

Most dev laptops are still running with 8GB.

2GB for a cache that isn't required by alternatives for the same result just feels bad.

And don't get me started into turning build scripts into full blown applications impossible to decipher what is going on without some kind of debugging process.

Because there's only one syntax (yes, XML, but it's consistent), it's fast, the documentation is comprehensible, it has multi-project and multi-module support that is easy to understand, I lose track of what else.

Gradle is the worst allergic reaction to XML in history.

because every Maven project is more or less same while Gradle projects vary drastically...I don't know how anyone can tolerate Gradle and performance benefit is not that great...

The performance benefit is huge.

I understand not wanting to learn another build tool, but I have no regrets where I've moved to gradle. It's so much faster on a project of any size it's stunning.

90% of maven projects don't do anything terribly complicated. Porting them to gradle leaves them uncomplicated and unexciting. I just wish there was a standard release mechanism. Poor as mavene-release is, at least everybody uses it and understands it.

> 90% of maven projects don't do anything terribly complicated. Porting them to gradle leaves them uncomplicated and unexciting.

They don't stay uncomplicated though. Someone puts a quick one-liner hack in the build definition to fix some trivial issue they were having, and it never gets removed, and years later it bites you. I don't trust myself to remember and understand arbitrary code that I put in a build definition, yet alone anyone else.