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So regexes tend to be inscrutable and uncomposable largely because of legacy, and partly because your operators naturally clash with the characters you're trying to match.

When Larry Wall was designing Rake nee Perl 6, he started by throwing out the POSIX baggage[1] to make the new regexes more readable. I think the common cases are far more readable, though you can judge for yourself.

It definitely improves composing regexes by providing a sane, built-in syntax for it.[2]

And since you're reading this, Raku also offers a full parser through its grammars.[3]

[1]: https://design.raku.org/S05.html#Simplified_lexical_parsing_...

[2]: https://docs.raku.org/language/regexes#Regex_interpolation

[3]: https://docs.raku.org/language/grammars.html

The writer of this article either a troll or untalented hack.

Lets talk about the article :
a) the so called XML tax : Agreed XML is not the best representation of information but it does seem to be particularly suited for build tasks.
Ant's plug in tasks give you a lot of leeway -- a prudent programmer would know how not to hang herself or himself. I hope for the writer's sake that the example he chose is not from his actual project. If it is, then the writer should probably find a different line of work.

b) Netbeans now supports Maven 'natively'. And before that, I have been faithfully and successfully upgrading my Netbeans version while working on enterprise scale applications.
The problems that the writer mentions are either exaggerations or a reflection of his ineptitude.

c) Maven : it took me a while to wrap my head around it and I hated learning how to write plugins -- in xml. But it was worth the effort. I implemented a Continuous Integration build system for my project that builds an EAR with over 1.2 million line of code.

Maven just works -- once you have put in the effort to learn the platform. The writer has not put in any effort towards that. In fact the maven problem he talks about is actually a quote from a third party. This guy really does not know what he is talking about.

Don't get me wrong -- ant and maven are far from perfect ; but this article only betrays the writer's ignorance and lack of skill.

And then he goes on to recommend Rake . Would you take recommendation from a guy who whines about stuff he knows nothing about ?