The Maven POM syntax might look bloaty to modern post-XML eyes, but it's not actually complicated: a typical POM only specifies the name of the project and its dependencies. The rest is typically all done by convention. It's also purely declarative so ordering doesn't matter.
M4 and sh are very concise languages. Nonetheless autotools is orders of magnitude more complex than Maven. You really can't compare at all.
At any rate, if you want a more concise syntax there is gradle (but it's a bit slower as it's actually executing a real scripting language) and, perhaps a nice middle ground, a thing called Polyglot Maven which is the same build engine but with a variety of non-XML syntaxes. The YAML one is quite nice:
To this effect, I use leiningen (which is mostly a frontend atop Maven's dependency management) even when I'm building a Jython or a Java project. If there is something funky I need to do as a build/deploy step, I'd rather be writing it in Clojure than Java, and mostly I just want to paste [com.example/foo "1.5.0"] into my :dependencies.
M4 and sh are very concise languages. Nonetheless autotools is orders of magnitude more complex than Maven. You really can't compare at all.
At any rate, if you want a more concise syntax there is gradle (but it's a bit slower as it's actually executing a real scripting language) and, perhaps a nice middle ground, a thing called Polyglot Maven which is the same build engine but with a variety of non-XML syntaxes. The YAML one is quite nice:
https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven/blob/master/poms/po...
That way you get simple syntax and a simple model, but still with lots of features.