Anecdotally, I've had more Node packages with native code in them fail to build for me when installed via npm, than Python packages with native code fail when installed via pip. That whole node-gyp thing is a huge mess.

> npm sucks and all, but at least it just works and doesn't get in my way as much.

used many package managers: pip, gem, go, npm, composer, etc... npm is the only one i have recent memories of having to kill & the only one that makes the fan go off (well okay most c/c++ do that too...)

quite frankly surprised by what i am seeing about python here. i have never been into the new stuff, pipenv, poetry, pipx, etc... maybe that's where the bad experience is coming from? i even don't know when and why it got so complex...

What does npm do that python can’t? I’m curious.

npm is equivalent to combining pip and virtualenv into a single tool. This gives better ergonomics when switching between projects since you never have to "activate" your environment, it's always activated when standing in the project directory.

Isn't this what Pipenv does? What has been a downer for me is that many of the cloud providers do not support pipfiles in their serverless app services (Elastic Beanstalk, App Engine etc.)

On second thought, at least on GCP I should be able to put the pipfiles into .gcloudignore and just update the requirements.txt file with each new commit using git hooks, build scripts or a ci/cd tool.

Yep, correct. Unfortunately I had quite a few issues with pipenv - mainly around its relationship with pip.

That does sound convenient. I wonder if the virtualenv aspect is relevant though, i.e. do people really deploy npm apps outside of a container/isolation layer?

I imagine if you're deploying docker, you probably should be developing in docker (e.g. using PyCharm's remote interpreter/docker interpreter integration).

Coming the opposite way: having started programming on python and only started doing node.js stuff recently, npm is awesome.

100% agree.

Coming from the scientific computing realm, I've only ever done "real" code in Python until a couple of weeks ago when I was forced to do some work in Typescript. Once I got over the initial worries about the best method to install npm to avoid Python-esque problems and gave nvm a try, I was very pleasantly surprised by the package management process and was able to just get on with the work.

I've tried various Python env management solutions in the past (mostly leaning towards conda), but had recently settled on just using separate LXC/LXD containers for each project.

Poetry does all that stuff, as discussed in the article.