I can see the appeal for Gradle over Maven. You can do a lot more with a lot less code + compilation times are much shorter. Makes maintaining and updating a program much easier over cleaning a repository if something gets messed up.

Back in may when I was picking up Java I remember in my intro course I was dumping individual .jar files and referencing dependencies manually. Why anyone would do that in the CURRENT YEAR is beyond me. 😣

I wish C++ had even half of the features that come standard on Java when I worked with it.