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You just described my experience with npm, except there aren't any useful tracebacks, just a note absolving npm of all blame and advising me to contact some random module author.

Edit: and of course with npm the annoying downloads happen every time for each project, instead of once per dependency version...

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Not excusing any crashes for npm (having those for any package manager sucks), but `npm init` doesn't download anything or make a project that needs to, it has readable config files and `npm --help` at least gives you a list of commands. A lot of the small stuff goes a long way to making things more approachable.

> `npm --help` at least gives you a list of commands

`mvn --help` gives you a list of commands too.

That's apples and oranges. You would have to set up some Express project or something to do what the Dropwizard archetype is doing.

Also package.json and pom.xml are equally (un)readable. At least Maven project files have a schema to help editors out.

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