[russell_h]

Personally, I consider the way Node does module loading one of its best features. No need to worry about version conflicts, because every module can (optionally) pull in a specific version if necessary. And no need to worry about constructing some ridiculous environment variable, because of the implicit relative pathing.

I've been writing Python and Go for the last 12 months, and by comparison their module systems are absolute disasters.

[WorldWideWayne]

Multiple versions of the same dependency could still work with a flat module file system and I don't see any reason why an environment variable would be needed.