I'm no js/node fan, but I'd say it's a hell of a lot easier to install and manage dependencies with npm (or yarn) than in python. To the extent that people joke about/are horrified by the number of dependencies managed by them in a typical project. There's just a lot more tooling around it that's somewhat official/default/the one way.

With pip you can manually pin versions, or 'freeze' what's currently installed, but then updating them is a manual effort or a third-party service like pyup.io.

> which languages do people feel have excellent package management?

Rust (technically cargo) is probably the best I've seen or used.

I think the most important thing Node did right was shipping an official package manager/manifest format/etc. alongside the runtime, from the very beginning. There is no fragmentation; yarn exists but it's a 100% equivalent drop-in replacement. Everybody's on the same page. Check out the source, run one command, and you're ready to go.

The second most important thing they did right was install dependencies locally in the project directory. There is no global state or environment dependency (unless you go out of your way to install some tool globally). Want to do a clean install? rm -rf node_modules and you're done. The only system-wide prerequisite is a single Node installation. No environment variables, nothing.

One mistake they did make was punting on the management of different Node versions, so you have to reach for nvm and any swapping-out has to happen at a global level. Cargo made the right decision to in-house this. However, even then, in my experience it's rarely an issue because Node is so stable.

Rust's cargo is the high water mark today (and is a substantial reason for Rust's popularity).

Ruby's rubygems, node's npm, and the elm package manager all get different things right and wrong, but at least they are a common approach that is somewhat sane. Python is total anarchy. I think most people would disagree with you about .Net, Go, and Javascript today vs python.

> Personally I’m also confused by Ruby.

Please elaborate. I've found Ruby gems to be the simplest packaging system. You make a file containing the gem specification and that's pretty much it. The most annoying part for me was bikeshedding the neatest way to glob all files in the project.

I will say that Ruby gems containing C extensions are really bad. It's cemented in mind the notion that foreign function interfaces must be built into the languages so that compiling code is never necessary.

> which languages do people feel have excellent package management?

Rust packages are really impressive. They just work. It's an isolated ecosystem like all the others, which is weird for a native language like Rust. Dependencies are mostly used at build time, many don't make it to the Linux distrubitons.

.net is just nuget. It seems pretty straightforward. The last time I looked for a "blessed" solution in python, it was some third part solution surrounded in some kind of internet/twitter drama.

I would guess that most people feel like .Net, Go, and Javascript have very easy distribution and package management