Why? You don't back that statement up with anything. What makes it better than `pip`?
> node isn't even close, since you need a c++ compiler to actually get quite a few packages
Well if the packages contain C/C++ modules and don't distribute binaries... (which a lot do). In Python land packages with a C++ module normally have a pure-python fallback anyway.
Completely not true in my experience. Running pip install and finding out a dependency is native code is the worst feeling, because now I need to replicate a dev environment for building the damn thing, on windows I don't even bother, on linux I'm left hunting down the right linux packages, which if someone bothered to specify was only specified for one of the distros.
> Why? You don't back that statement up with anything. What makes it better than `pip`?
I'm not super familiar with the python ecosystem, but my biggest gripe is above (randomly, dependencies will fail to install). My second gripe with python is that so many things need virtualenv.
In this regard I've had a lot less pain with npm (but I've also done far fewer things in node), and I've never had an issue using a library in the java ecosystem, I just plug the appropriate deps into my build system, and it works, no installation required.
Beyond "can I use the packages easily", Maven also supports artifactory so that we can have org-wide libraries rather than needing to rely on git to avoid duplicating files everywhere. Beyond that Maven is also the Grunt of the Java world; it compiles your code, it invokes JUnit, it runs your fancy code rewriting modules, it does your jar/war packaging, and runs all the other modules you want.
Maven has it's own issues sometimes, but having too much XML is so far down the list of things I care about, but Gradle is nice too and the syntax is much more terse and I try to use it for my own non-work projects.
In contrast to the general "install a pile of things not in your dependency manager" approach of pip/npm, I just setup a java project to use webkit (with no prior experience trying to do this in java at all) in 5 minutes by adding 2 entries to a pom.xml file as described on https://github.com/ui4j/ui4j/
From what I understand, there's a fairly large chasm between Python 2/3 (such that a lot of people use external libraries to deal with coding cross-compatibile code, and apparently get wrong some-times).
packages with a C++ module normally...
I can use ANY maven dependency, regardless of what JVM language it was built with, what language level (java 1.1 - 1.8) it was built with, pretty much anything.