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Comment by zajio1am | Hacker News Reader

> 2) jealous, insisting that every language has to conform to their way of doing things

Well, programming languages clearly should not be in business of software distribution. That creates unnecessary tight coupling between language, build system and distribution, causes proliferation of language-specific package managers incompatible with a platform way of doing things.

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Something Java and the Java ecosystem is terrible at. I've had project where we needed all of 7,8,9 and 10 [0] for the data stack: Hadoop, Scala, Spark, HDFS, zookeeper, pyspark. Good luck setting that up on a single machine, containers all the way. The java path nightmares I still have. I'm probably one of the few people in the word who know this much about the JVM without ever having written any Java.

[0] We should have also been following 11 but just didn't have the resources to even think about doing it.

> I've had project where we needed all of 7,8,9 and 10 [0] for the data stack: Hadoop, Scala, Spark, HDFS, zookeeper, pyspark.

I suspect that a big reason was due to using Scala, which is notorious for not maintaining binary backward compatibility across minor releases.

To be fair, most languages don't maintain backward binary compatibility.

In fact, this is so common that some package managers don't even bother distributing binaries: go modules, cargo, conan, etc.

Scala's version is epoch.major.minor, not major.minor.patch. I though 2.12.(x+1) is generally binary compatible with 2.12.x. Or at least I personally never ran into that issue with Scala itself.

Scala breaks binary compatibility approximately every 2-3 years, which is fast by JVM standards but slow compared to most programming languages (e.g. Python releases an incompatible version every 1-2 years). You can blame Scala for at most one incompatibility in that long list; older versions of Scala are incompatible with Java 9+ (this is true for many JVM frameworks too, as Java 9 made breaking changes).

Not so obviously as you might think. But, if they are going to do it, they should clearly do it well

Right, but my experience is that Java (and a few others) have succeeded in this space. I actually wish that I could use maven to install system software rather than having to rely on something like apt.

I am intrigued by the experiences you have had which lead you to precisely the reverse conclusion to mine.

Wow. My experience is that Java got it spectacularly wrong, with different tools stepping on each other constantly.

I wish that I could do literally anything else in my life but use maven.

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