[gen220]

Chiming back in to say that, while everything you're saying is correct (i.e. Python was not a ubiquitous language until "relatively" recently), it doesn't change the point: the best packaging solutions, done right, need to be done early in a language's history.

To illustrate the point with an example, you could invent cargo for python yesterday or in 2005, but it wouldn't have solved the problem, because you would still have decades-worth of third-party libraries that wouldn't comply to py-cargo's packaging requirements.

In contexts like these, it's the package manager with the fewest hard-asks (i.e. pip, or npm for node) that wins.

Go, for example, endured major controversies over migrating away from GOPATH-managed-with-third-party-dep-managers to go modules. Even though `go mod` would have been the best solution to start with from scratch, inertia and breaking changes are a real thing.