alt Hacker NewsProbably not. NPM has its problems but Python packaging has always been significantly messier (partly because, Python is much older than Node and, indeed, much older than the very concept of resolving dependencies over the internet).
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int_19h • 06/24/2025
The upside in Python is that dependencies tend to be more coarse grained and things break less when you update. With JS you have to be on the treadmill constantly to avoid bitrot, and because packages tend to be so small and dependency trees so large, there's a lot of potential points of failure when updating anything.
The bigger problem in Python has been its slowness and reliance on C dependencies.
Maven solved Java packaging circa 2005, for example. Yes, XML is verbose, but it's an implementation detail. Python still lags on many fronts, 20 years later.
An example: even now it makes 0 sense to me why virtual envs are not designed and supposed to be portable between machines with the same architecture (!). Or why venvs need to be activated with shell-variety specific code.