What about pip? It's either installed or immediately available on many OSes

pip might be but it was historically super inconsistent (at least in my experience). Is it `pip install`? `python3 -m pip install`? maybe `pip3 install`? Yeah ubuntu did a lot of damage to pip here. npm always worked because you had to install it and it didnt have a transition phase from python2 being in the OS by default.

system pip w/ sudo usually unleashes Zalgo, i’d rather curl | bash but npm is fine too. it’s just about meeting people where they’re at, and in the ai age many devs have npm

if you build for the web, no matter what your backend is (python, go, rust, java, c#), your frontend will almost certainly have some js, so likely you need npm.

`pip install` either doesn’t work out of the box or has the chance to clobber system files though

This is about eight years old. The python situation has mostly gotten worse since https://xkcd.com/1987/

python packaging / envs is solved now by uv. its not promising or used by people in the know like the last 2 trendy python package managers. i was a big time python hater since it was a pita to support as a devtools guy but now its trivial. uv just works, it won.

I'm not a python dev, but I see a bit of its ecosystem. How does uv compare with conda or venv? I thought JS had the monopoly on competing package managers.

What? It’s much much better now, you can just use uv. Yeah, it’s yet another package manager, but it does it well.

Or go up a rung or two on the abstraction ladder, and use mise to manage all the things (node, npm, python, etc).