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Comment by kenhwang | Hacker News Reader

Man, if one of Go's pros is "good package manager", I'd hate to see what terrible package managers he's experienced. Seems weird to call out Java package management as a con in comparison.

I love Scala's type system, though, I suppose if I didn't have a very good CS degree I'd hate it. I think it strikes a good balance between powerful and usable.

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Scala's type system is it strength not a con, actually it is very beginner friendly just not in the way Drew thinks, it's just more high level, By that definition he could also call Clojure a Java derivative because it runs on JVM.

Java doesn't come with a package manager out of the box so most projects seem to go with Maven. If you've tried to understand a project with multiple pom.xml's then for me putting it in the con is a good call.

While this is true, it's not an inherent problem of maven, it's an inherent problem of dependency management is f*cking difficult™.

Maven is inherently bad too, though

In which way exactly? Having worked with many, many different package managers, I've come to appreciate Maven's way of doing things. Even though it has many drawbacks:

- XML structure is verbose

- Plugin architecture makes standard behaviour opaque

- Default HTTP with no package signatures is recipe for security problems

- "Stages" seem arbitrary and it's not always clear which stages are performed.

- Community seems to move to newer systems such as Gradle (and SBT for Scala).

But, there are also strengths. The configuration format can be extended easily using the plugin architecture. This provides a huge opportunity to extend the functionality.

It is battle hardened over time, which means it is very stable and it has a huge plugin architecture.

Well, I think you've covered the issues I was going to mention!

and Maven is super bloated due to too many downloaded dependencies. An Hello World example with Maven can download up to 50MB of plugins and useless things

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