[smallerfish]

Maven was launched 9 years after Java got popular. Everybody was using Ant, everybody decided Ant sucked and moved to the new solution. While Gradle is the new kid on the block, it keeps the infrastructure of dependency management and is thus compatible with Maven to that extent. It can be done.

[RegW]

Ant didn't do package management.

[smallerfish]

No, but ivy was commonly used. That said, the bigger point is that the standard way to do things can be changed. For some reason, despite (or because of?) PEP, the python community seems unable to coalesce around standard ways of packaging.

[RegW]

Perhaps I have lived too long out in the provences, but Maven was my first experience of dependency management in Java. After Ant it was a no-brainer because Ant didn't do dependencies. I didn't come across references to Ivy for some years and personally I have never seen it used in the wild.

That said, I didn't actually like early Maven that much, it was pretty inflexible and often required the AntRun plugin to do something novel. However, it is still top dog everywhere I work and very much the standard way to do things.