and i dont particularly think that using xml is that bad. The schema is well defined, and gives you good autocompletion in any competent IDE (such as intellij).

and i dont particularly think that using xml is that bad. The schema is well defined, and gives you good autocompletion in any competent IDE (such as intellij). It took some iterations before maven 3 became "good", so people forget that it wasn't as nice before now! Unfortunately, it seems that the lessons learned there is never really disseminated to other ecosystems - perhaps due to prejudice against "enterprisey" java. Yet, these package managers are now facing the sorts of problems solved in java.