[reilly3000]

Why is it that Python is geared towards archiving packages at the site level by default while npm, composer, et all tend towards including packages in the project's folder? Is it convention from a time when disk space was less plentiful?

[gary_bernhardt]

"Why" is hard, but Python's packaging system was created when global installation was just how packaging worked. There may have been exceptions, but the first local package installation tool I knew of was workingenv (2006). It was the predecessor of virtualenv, which I think led directly to pipenv.