[tomphoolery]

As someone who used Go since before v1, I can say that Go's approach to dependency management was basically "we don't want to touch it until we know we have the right idea". At the time, dependency management solutions were pretty primitive to what we have today...there was no caching, and if the central server where you got your dependencies was down, you were shit out of luck. So this was really not a bad decision for the language maintainers if they wanted to keep their sanity and not subject their user base to "legacy on arrival" software. By depending on URLs and using a `$GOPATH`, this problem was solved from a localized perspective...as a developer, I could vendor in packages, not check them into Git, and compile the program. It worked.

However, the biggest problem with depending on packages in Go back then was that it was difficult to communicate to other people on your project the exact version of the dependency that you wanted them to install. For projects in which you were the only developer, this wasn't an issue...but as soon as you started to use Go in a team setting, it became a real blocker toward getting your work done. Go developers needed _some_ way to communicate what version of each package they wanted to install, and a bunch of solutions popped up to help with that. But they were all still bound by the `$GOPATH` constraint and such.

Although it took a lot longer than many predicted, I'm still pretty happy with how Go approached dependency management at the end of the day. Generally, all I have to do is import a dependency from a known URL and my editor/Go modules will take care of the installation work. This is way better than the JS world, in which if I want to just sketch something out I have to actually install the dependencies I need otherwise TypeScript will yell at me. With Go, it all seems to happen automatically.

[richbell]

> At the time, dependency management solutions were pretty primitive to what we have today...

What has fundamentally changed since then, in your opinion?