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Comment by komuher | Hacker News Reader

Kinda diffrent Rust its like 3 years old when it start getting popular. Python is 13+ years old when it starts getting very popular. You cannot compare legacy to modern solution -.-

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Perl is 33 years old, and perl 5.x is 27 years old.

I can literally take a 20+yo book and all the examples still work. CPAN still works. I literally have 20+yo scripts still copied from server to server, from laptop to laptop, without any changes.

Maven was launched 9 years after Java got popular. Everybody was using Ant, everybody decided Ant sucked and moved to the new solution. While Gradle is the new kid on the block, it keeps the infrastructure of dependency management and is thus compatible with Maven to that extent. It can be done.

Ant didn't do package management.

No, but ivy was commonly used. That said, the bigger point is that the standard way to do things can be changed. For some reason, despite (or because of?) PEP, the python community seems unable to coalesce around standard ways of packaging.

Perhaps I have lived too long out in the provences, but Maven was my first experience of dependency management in Java. After Ant it was a no-brainer because Ant didn't do dependencies. I didn't come across references to Ivy for some years and personally I have never seen it used in the wild.

That said, I didn't actually like early Maven that much, it was pretty inflexible and often required the AntRun plugin to do something novel. However, it is still top dog everywhere I work and very much the standard way to do things.

Which is exactly what my second paragraph said :). This is a common struggle for many older programming language ecosystems, e.g. I think the same is true to some extend for C and C++.

As one of the sibling commenters mentions, there are good examples that it is possible to standardize packaging better. Maven replaced IDE-driven builds and Ant for in the Java ecosystem and added proper package management. Additionally, it required that projects start conforming to standardized layouts, by taking convention over configuration and being largely declarative. I think the Maven success story lost some of its shine with Gradle, but that's another story.

Which is why I'm starting to feel like Python is the new Java.

Strange, because python was released almost 5 years before java.

Python is the Old Java :P

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