I've come to the conclusion that every language is broken from the point of view of people actually working with the language rather than relying on tools previ

I've come to the conclusion that every language is broken from the point of view of people actually working with the language rather than relying on tools previously written in it. Ruby has broken out of this with rvm, maven kinda-sorta fixes Java but seems to come with a bundle of baggage, virtualenv with your own python build works well enough. CLBuild and QuickLisp, the Haskell Platform and from what I can tell Racket automate a similar approach. I don't know much about the Perl ecosystem, but at a guess I'd say that Perl's backwards compatibility saves it better than most. And this is before you start looking at the code quality and release processes of the libraries packaged in the languages' own distribution mechanisms. Seriously, unless you're working in C/++, I think it's only worth using the system-bundled languages if you're actually targeting the OS itself. If you're targeting more than one platform, using your own build seems to be the only way to stay sane. If you're only targeting a single platform, unless you're tracking a bleeding-edge-style distro like Arch, you can guarantee that all the fun development is going to be going on somewhere you can't reach. Luckily, we have checkinstall.