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Any old enough language will have competing libraries that you need to learn in the long run too.

• saghm 10mo ago
  Libraries, yes. Tooling around packages/building/managing runtimes? I'm not convinced. Perl has been using CPAN like two decades now, and I wouldn't consider that ecosystem to exactly be an example of "there's only one way to do it". I feel like you're extrapolating in the wrong direction; older languages are less likely to have first party tooling for this, so they're more likely to have multiple ways of doing it, but I don't think there's much evidence that a language that started out with first party tooling will always follow that same trend. I don't think the issue with Python is it's age as much as the tooling it has was just really not good for a long time. People will probably want to replace subpar tooling regardless of the official status if there's a better alternative, but I'd expect that I'm the presence of good enough first-party tooling, people will eventually stop bothering. I do actually think Go is a bit of an illustrative example here because it started out with just `go get` and liberal use of vendoring, then accumulated a variety of attempted replacements (e.g. godep and dep, which confusingly were not the same thing), but eventually the first party tooling around modules became a thing and after some time it seems like pretty much everyone dropped those interim tools and standardized on the official tooling. I feel like this actually shows that the proliferation of tooling can actually be stopped even if it didn't exist early on, provided that there's a process for making it official.