I don't think your parent was endorsing this state of affairs, but merely offering it as an explanation. I think they are correct - the platform package manager

I don't think your parent was endorsing this state of affairs, but merely offering it as an explanation. I think they are correct - the platform package managers are good enough for the purpose of developers to make it hard for any proper language package manager to gain traction. Even though these approaches may be deeply flawed - by making reproducible builds impossible, among other issues - a majority of users are satisfied with it and do not suffer enough pain to move on. Indeed, I'd much rather `pacman -S boost` and be done in three minutes than wait three hours for a package manager to build it from source. Nix and Guix do get closer to the mark since they allow reproducible builds and can download binaries for me but as long as adoption remains limited I'll be packaging too many libraries myself.