If you're motivated to wade this far down the thread, but can't be bothered to explain one concrete benefit in one sentence, I've gotta assume it's pretty difficult to come up with one.
Just one, to not prevent you from doing your own research:
Type-checked build definitions.
I lost days to debugging broken Maven setups were some tags were misspelled or placed at the wrong position, and Maven just gave a shit about it.
SBT immediately tells you what's the issue.
Another one: It's completely painless to introduce new settings/keys/commands/tasks. Want to have a deployment step which moves some files to the right place after compilation?
3 lines of code. 3 lines, not a god damn Maven plugin.
Well, we seem to disagree on the usefulness of those items and the quality of SBT's solutions vs the pain of rebuilding an entire new build/deployment stack and fighting through all the bugs you've created.
We'll just have to see how history unfolds. IMO sbt already hit the high-water mark and is receding, lots of shops using scala today advocate using mvn.
EDIT: You inspired me to do some research. Apparently, senior engineers from typesafe do hour-long presentations named "Effective SBT" at Scala Dayz conferences. Truly the simplest of build tools.
> IMO sbt already hit the high-water mark and is receding, lots of shops using scala today advocate using mvn.
I haven't seen that at all in practice. I think that's just a bit of noise on the internet.
SBT keeps getting better, and many shops which originally opted to stay with Maven are now moving to SBT, because it's just so much better than Maven.
Not sure what your problem is. Even back in the 0.7 days, SBT was better than Maven. I'll change profession before I ever move back to Maven.
Oh, let's have a look what that "senior Typesafe" guy has to say about SBT vs. Maven:
Well, coming from first contributing to the maven-scala-
plugin, then eclipse, then sbt itself, I can tell you that
some of the things we do in sbt just fundamentally won't
work in Maven, otherwise I'd have tried them.
If you'd like my branch list of broken experiments, I can
share them, but be assured that I personally was an sbt
hater before learning the tool.
All of the complaints of syntax and documentation DO
represent a younger project vs. a more mature one.
However, architecturally, I'm placing my money on sbt over
maven. THat's not to say sbt is perfect, but I think most
of these complaints are adressible.
