Re:Ant is for wimps (Score 1)

The Java-centricity of Ant is its biggest weakness. Having to learn Ant for Java and make for everything else is just not good. I just use make for everything and my life is simpler for it.

Chicken and egg. As a Java based tool, Ant was built by and for Java developers, and requires a Java Runtime Environment to execute the scripts.

It's not difficult to add support for compiling and executing stuff other than Java (indeed, there are many such "tasks" already available), it's just that if you are, for example, doing C/C++ development on *nix, you're less likely to be motivated to install, configure and execute a JVM in order to do the builds when make suffices.

Without question though, Ant is the defacto standard for open source Java builds, and rightly so.