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by diarrhea 2214 days ago
> As pioneers in dependency management

Maybe a noob question, but how come they are pioneers? Weren't there languages with package systems before Python and JS?

2 comments

Actually no. As diegof79 pointed out, Perl was the first one with a centralized package management system with CPAN. Perl was first released in 1987. Python was first released in 1990. Javascript was first released in 1995. The internet was the launch pad for these open source languages, which allowed the sharing of code written in these languages.

Another thing to note is that dependencies were not that complex in the 90s. The idea of dependency management started when there was too many dependencies to manage and the existing tools could not reliably reproduce builds. My guess is that all these package use took off after the dotcom boom in 2000 and everyone started building websites with Ruby, Python and eventually Nodejs.

My first encounter with something like a package manager was CPAN for Perl... maybe they were the pioneers