I totally agree with the article. I love somethings about maven but XML is a pain to work on.

I am thinking that a build system can be built on top of Java. But Java for shell scripting has some drawbacks that can be alleviated. I am working on these little tool to use regular java for shell scripting, it is auto compilable and it has better abstractions for file manipulation. https://github.com/huherto/jashi