Actually criticism is mostly personal however there are a few:
- I dislike the DSL // not a really useful criticism I know.
- Some things needs Groovy which isn't a mainstream language
- Had Bad support for Scala, which I use heavily mostly resolved since 2.2 and thanks to linkedin newer version even have twirl + playframework support.
- sometimes the syntax file of the DSL couldn't be highlighted in eclipse / intellij
- Bigger build files could be really slow (mostly resolved in newer versions)
Btw. whats really really good on Gradle is the dependency resolution, which is really fast compared to something like sbt.
Originally on Gradle.org's website, they wrote they'd encourage anyone who wanted to enable Gradle to allow another scripting language for writing build files, and that they'd help them with bundling it. But since Gradle 2, it looks like too much of Gradle's own source and plugin code is written in Groovy for that to still be feasible. Gradleware also employed one of the former developers who used to work on Groovy when they were retrenched by VMWare a year ago, and I suspect he'd actually sabotage any outside attempt to make Gradle polyglot, like, say, Vert.x is. So it looks like you're stuck with Groovy if you want to use Gradle. With the good comes the bad, as they say!
