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Comment by escardin | Hacker News Reader

> Cool, I thought so, I just wasn't 100% sure! I think it's interesting how different people take away different things here, to me, this demonstrates that you don't have to have namespaces; many of the largest ecosystems do not and have not had them. We did learn a lesson there, just didn't come to the same conclusion that you did. This one is more controversial within the community though, many people do agree with you.

Maven is from 2004 and has namespaces. Maven has it's problems, but the Java package management ecosystem gets many things right that later systems have not.

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You are correct that Maven is one of the first package registries to use a principled approach toward namespacing.

I didn't mention it because -- and this may be rude to Maven -- I consider Maven's coordinates syntax to be closer to "primitive Go" than it's own distinct thing. If software hosted on `example.com/foo/bar` has the package name `com.example.foo/bar` then it's introducing ambiguity without much benefit.

It's not just the hosting, it's decoupled from where the project is hosted. Some packages do just use an arbitrary groupId. The reversed-domain-name convention makes sure you'll never get two different groups claiming the same name, and aligns with the convention for how code is namespaced in Java, but it is ultimately only a convention.

>The reversed-domain-name convention makes sure you'll never get two different groups claiming the same name

Surely that's only true at any one instant? Domain names change hands all the time.

For example: All non-EU citizens in the UK that have .eu domain will have them forcibly de-registered at the end of the year. What happens to a eu.example.foo package then?

True, but it's hard to imagine a developer accidentally buying a domain that had previously been used by an unrelated developer and wanting to release packages under the same namespace.

Sure, but that’s not really what I was talking about. Citing maven would have made the point stronger for exactly that reason!

(And the lesson isn’t that either, the claim was never “this feature is terrible and ruins the language”, there very much are successful examples. The claim is that the lack of the feature does not mean failure.)

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