Comment by dkarl

Perl is mature, too.

Maven is awful. SBT is awful. Gradle is awful. I've used them all professionally, and the best I can say about them is that you can get the job done with them.

Newer languages and newer build systems are much better experiences, because of decades more hindsight and because language designers think about tooling from the start. Java was designed with the assumption that all software projects were built with Make, and with no ambition to improve on that. There was no Java-specific build tool until Ant was released as a standalone tool circa 2000.

> What is wrong with CMake for C++?

Granted, most of what's wrong with CMake is the problem it solves. Probably there's no solution that wouldn't be at least close to as awful as CMake. But it is objectively a hideous experience compared to any language created in the last 15 years.