Fair enough. As I noted to another commenter, I'm not trying to say there was no prior art (if nothing else there was Maven), just that they were following the overwhelming majority of mainstream languages at the time.

> just that they were following the overwhelming majority of mainstream languages at the time.

They were trying to do better than mainstream languages in other areas and succeeded. IIRC on this front they just decided Ruby's bundler was the bee's knees.

The same developer who worked on bundler also worked on the initial version of cargo. That’s why they’re similar.

And at that time, it was a good idea. Ruby was popular and bundler + gem ecosystem was a big reason for its popularity. No one was worried that Rust might become so popular that it might outgrow the bundler model. That was only a remote possibility to begin with.

A mistake that many programmers make, as if baking one more feature on top would have made any difference that wouldn't be amortized in just a few weeks... Sigh.