I think that one of big reasons people jump to new languages like Ruby is that there isn't all this cruft. It may not be related to the build system but just look at logging in java versus logging in Ruby. I know everybody likes to talk about the advanced features of the Ruby language but I can't help but think that much of the productivity boost comes from getting rid of this stuff.
It may not be related to the build system but just look at logging in java versus logging in Ruby.
I was in a meeting once where I was the lone "cowboy" Perl programmer amongst amongst a group of Java dudes. One Java dude told another off for doing logging wrong. He said "I have a book on this logging package if you want to borrow it."
None of them knew why I laughed, but to me, logging was just a fancy print statement. And somebody wrote a book about it.
The thing about Java developers is that some of them are probably seasoned developers. They've been through many projects with scars everywhere. From each project, they learned something new (not necessarily the best way, but albeit something new). Combine that with the fact that there are people out there who have been through these situations and wrote "best practices".
When they build the next system, they will try to use these best practices to avoid their problems they've been through in the past. When this happened, they are already experiencing the second-system syndrome (but they don't realized it).
