As a former PHPer myself, I agree with you on all counts. Python's tooling, especially around package management is _terrible_, hand's down the worst of any maj

As a former PHPer myself, I agree with you on all counts. Python's tooling, especially around package management is _terrible_, hand's down the worst of any major dynamic language, even comparing where they were 5 years ago to where Python is today. Virtual environments are Python's "solution" for local installs, where everyone else supports local installs by default. There's no standard way to specify dev dependencies, they're just all dependencies. Thankfully now most things are pip installable without problems unlike 5-10 years ago, but you'll still occasionally run into weird easy_install/setup/wheel issues. I'll note that my other complaint is the quality of many open source libraries are a significant step below their counterparts in PHP, Ruby or JS. Django, boto and presumably the data science libraries are top notch, but after that even heavily used projects like celery lack the level of polish that major projects in other languages have.