> Why to I need NPM? JQuery and Prototype didn't need a package manager. But that is a question that can be asked of any language. It's a given that any modern

> Why to I need NPM? JQuery and Prototype didn't need a package manager. But that is a question that can be asked of any language. It's a given that any modern language would have a package manager. Ruby has gems, python has pip, rust has cargo, and so on. PHP didn't use to have a package manager, to the chagrin of many professional web developers, until finally there was Composer, and the php community breathed a collective sigh of relief. Package management is good. It helps you define all your project dependencies in a sane way in a configuration file, and put that in source control, rather than download all the dependencies locally and store those in source control. Javascript had different package managers. It had bower. It had meteor packages. It had something else as well. It had different module formats. It has a rather convoluted history. Luckily, with the popularity of node, we now have only a couple — npm and yarn. Or just one, which is npm, if you consider only the standard tools that come bundled with node.