The problem is that it is not default or recommended way of doing things. My issue is that yes, people do want the build script language to be simple, but this (in my experience) always comes to bite you when the project gets bigger.
I mostly work with CMake and there we have to do a lot of arcane gymnastics to do basic stuff like list manipulation or moving files around, simply because the language has most of these features tacked on after the creator realises that they are necessary.
In Gradle, for example, I have a fairly trivial library that needs to build some native bindings at the right moment and after fighting with the DSL I ended up writing the build script in PowerShell and just call that. I think that the build systems I have encountered so far focus on the 'simple' case too much and render even little more advanced tasks tedious.
I would be happier with a build system that does not declare any magic variables or default steps.
I mostly work with CMake and there we have to do a lot of arcane gymnastics to do basic stuff like list manipulation or moving files around, simply because the language has most of these features tacked on after the creator realises that they are necessary.
In Gradle, for example, I have a fairly trivial library that needs to build some native bindings at the right moment and after fighting with the DSL I ended up writing the build script in PowerShell and just call that. I think that the build systems I have encountered so far focus on the 'simple' case too much and render even little more advanced tasks tedious.
I would be happier with a build system that does not declare any magic variables or default steps.