Gradle
From APIDesign
These days it is common to praise Apache's Gradle and dishonest Maven. It is hard to find articles like Maven's Inflexibility Is Its Best Feature that would try to put some balance into the build tool flamewar raging around.
It is true that Maven is far from perfect, and possibly Gradle learned from Maven mistakes in many areas, but there is one thing where Gradle regressed totally - and which I consider far bigger problem than any shortcomings of Maven: Gradle brought halting problem into your build job!
Why Should I Care about halting problem?
If you don't know what a halting problem is, you may belong into the camp of people who believe one can write program to solve any (digitalizable) problem. Well, you cannot - there are (digitalized) problems that computer's cannot solve - halting problem is core one. Its implications are huge. As a result of halting problem existence it is impossible to write a program that would completely understand behavior of all other programs.
That of course won't stop people from trying to write such program (as illustrated in the essay about finite automaton), but the only way to really analyse what a program does is to restrict language in which it is written!
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