Ruby gets it right, too. You can have a very simple gem setup if you want it - set GEM_HOME and away you go. I'm sure it's possible to get the same simplicity

Ruby gets it right, too. You can have a very simple gem setup if you want it - set GEM_HOME and away you go. I'm sure it's possible to get the same simplicity with Python. The issue I see is that the default tools people turn to hide this simplicity behind a shiny interface, and encourage people to think of the management tools as magic black boxes. The tools then become the only interface people know, and they're inevitably more complicated and fragile than the underlying mechanism.