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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

100% agree. It's unbelievable what a PITA it is dealing with pip or npm compared to Maven even 10 years ago. The descriptors could get convoluted but you could also edit them in an IDE that knew the expected tokens to make things happen.

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What’s so hard about “npm install” and “package.json”. It’s dead simple

No you see Java devs have stockholm-syndromed themselves into believe that a giant stack of XML, or some unhinged mini-language are actually good, and much better than something the humans involved can actually read and parse easily and now to compensate with other ecosystems providing 85% of the functionality, with 5% of the pain, they’ve got to find some reason to complain about them.

what's wrong with XML? Maven XML is a configuration not a programming language.

Is this a joke? XML is horrible to work with, more boilerplate than information. Compare your average maven file to a cargo.toml and tell me which is easier to work with...

"XML is more verbose" is a lazy criticism in the same veign as "Python is better than Java because you can do 'Hello World' in one line".

Maven files have a simple conventional structure and a defined schema. Once you learn it, it's a breeze to work with. It's not like you need to write hundreds of lines of SOAP or XLST — which is actually why people started to dislike XML, and not because XML inherently bad.

Edit: I'd also take XML over TOML any day, especially when it comes to nested objects and arrays.

For a descriptor verbose is superior. It's way clearer what you're looking at. Matching a named end tag is much easier than matching a }. Also, XSD means you can strictly type and enumerate valid values and you will instantly see if you've written something invalid.

Maven stores every version of every library you've ever needed in a central location. It doesn't pollute your working directory and it caches between projects. And this is more of a Java thing than a Maven, thing, but backwards compatibility between versions is way easier to manage. There's no incompatible binaries because you changed the node runtime between npm install and running your project.

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