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Writing Maven plugins is quite easy and doesn't require you to learn another language (like in case of gradle, you have to know groovy).

At least with Groovy, most Java programs are also valid groovy programs (the converse is not true, but not too different).

Yes, but with groovy you get magnitude slower compilation time, less efficient autocomplete.

And a language that has sometimes strange design choices.

Groovy is like PHP, if I need to upgrade from Java it would be Scala. At least I get a superior language for also magnitude slower builds.

Gradle has a Kotlin Script build script option these days too. I haven't tried it yet, so I'm not sure if it's any better.