Re:Ask HN: Has anyone here programmed in Kotlin? What do you...
by EdwardDiego on Saturday July 25, 2015 @08:31PM
(#9949620)
> Beyond that, we used to find ourselves in dependency hell with maven pretty frequently
You'll hit that with Gradle, Ivy, Leiningen, SBT and Buildr too.
> The biggest problem, imho, is that it's inflexible. You can't just (easily) throw in a bit of functionality or make an unusual tweak to your build. So, if you can't find an existing plugin to do what you need, you have to write it yourself.
I'd also call that it's biggest strength. Maven POMs are only ever declarative. I've never hit a FOSS project using Maven that I couldn't build, but I've hit plenty using SBT or Ant that I had to tweak to build.
> I've written a maven plugin, and the documentation/support was rather poor.
I had the same experience with Gradle's DSL documentation, although having a look at it now, they've dramatically improved it since then.
You'll hit that with Gradle, Ivy, Leiningen, SBT and Buildr too.
> The biggest problem, imho, is that it's inflexible. You can't just (easily) throw in a bit of functionality or make an unusual tweak to your build. So, if you can't find an existing plugin to do what you need, you have to write it yourself.
I'd also call that it's biggest strength. Maven POMs are only ever declarative. I've never hit a FOSS project using Maven that I couldn't build, but I've hit plenty using SBT or Ant that I had to tweak to build.
> I've written a maven plugin, and the documentation/support was rather poor.
I had the same experience with Gradle's DSL documentation, although having a look at it now, they've dramatically improved it since then.