Comparing Maven and Gradle

I have been using Maven for a long time. I used to use Ant and it took me a while to get used to Maven and accept the Maven way. Reading a blog post from Neal Ford Why Everyone (Eventually) Hates (or Leaves) Maven got me thinking. He talks about the popularity of 4GL, Fourth Generation Languages, during the 1990s and why they never really took off. The idea was great, but they were not able to solve the entire problem good enough. They solved perhaps 80% easily and the rest was harder and the last part was even harder to solve. The customers want this last part as well and that is the reason why we use general purpose programming languages today.

I used Paradox to build a system for a customer a long time ago. I was able to solve most of their problems.

One thing though, there was an error situation and the customer demanded a correct error message. My problem was that it was a system error that came from the runtime environment that I couldn't control. My solution? To patch the binary that I delivered my application with. I replaced the error message with another message. I was lucky, the message I needed was one character shorter so the binary format was never changed. I am not sure that it was legal, I never asked Borland about it. But the error message became correct and the customer was happy and so was I.