[iainmerrick]

People complain a lot about NPM, but I find it solves all these problems reasonably nicely. It's pretty easy to use in development and it's easy to deploy (either using node_modules in production, or bundling, both approaches work).

Of course it only works if your codebase and tools are all JS-based!

Having worked recently on a project that was mostly TypeScript with some Python, the TS bits were mostly straightforward but the Python was a hassle in both dev and production (I used venv). I can see that asdf might have been handy for development but if it didn't have a good deployment workflow that wouldn't have helped.

[brabel]

Every language has a tool like NPM (actually, nvm in the context of this discussion) these days. The problems tools like Nix solves (and arguably, Asdf) is that instead of learning each language's tools you only need to learn one tool that manages multiple languages and system dependencies.