This was always my issue with pip and venv: I don’t want a thing that hijacks my terminal and PATH, flips my world upside down and makes writing automated headless scripts and systemd services a huge pain.
When I drop into a Node.js project, usually some things have changed, but I always know that if I need to, I can find all of my dependencies in my node_modules folder, and I can package up that folder and move it wherever I need to without breaking anything, needing to reset my PATH or needing to call `source` inside a Dockerfile (oh lord). Many people complain about Node and npm, but as someone who works on a million things, Node/npm is never something I need to think about.
Python/pip though… Every time I need to containerize or setup a Python project for some arbitrary task, there’s always an issue with “Your Linux distro doesn’t support that version of Python anymore”, forcing me to use a newer version than the project wants and triggering an avalanche of new “you really shouldn’t install packages globally” messages, demanding new —yes-destroy-my-computer-dangerously-and-step-on-my-face-daddy flags and crashing my automated scripts from last year.
And then there’s Conda, which has all of these problems and is also closed source (I think?) and has a EULA, which makes it an even bigger pain to automate cleanly (And yes I know about mamba, and miniconda, but the default tool everyone uses should be the one that’s easy to work with).
And yes, I know that if I was a full-time Python dev there’s a “better way” that I’d know about. But I think a desirable quality for languages/ecosystems is the ability for an outsider to drop in with general Linux/Docker knowledge and be able to package things up in a sometimes unusual way. And until uv, Python absolutely failed in this regard.