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> 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 softwa

> 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.

moonbug 7y ago
Not so obviously as you might think. But, if they are going to do it, they should clearly do it well
- lmm 7y ago
  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.
  - regularfry 7y ago
    I am intrigued by the experiences you have had which lead you to precisely the reverse conclusion to mine.
  - ori_b 7y ago
    Wow. My experience is that Java got it spectacularly wrong, with different tools stepping on each other constantly.
  - moonbug 7y ago
    I wish that I could do literally anything else in my life but use maven.
buzzkillington 7y ago
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.
- apta 7y ago
  > 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.
  - paulddraper 7y ago
    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.
  - raquo 7y ago
    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.
  - lmm 7y ago
    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).

moonbug 7y ago

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

lmm 7y ago
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.
- regularfry 7y ago
  I am intrigued by the experiences you have had which lead you to precisely the reverse conclusion to mine.
- ori_b 7y ago
  Wow. My experience is that Java got it spectacularly wrong, with different tools stepping on each other constantly.
- moonbug 7y ago
  I wish that I could do literally anything else in my life but use maven.

buzzkillington 7y ago

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.

apta 7y ago
> 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.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  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.
- raquo 7y ago
  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.
- lmm 7y ago
  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).