Comment by danpalmer
6 hours ago
To my knowledge NPM isn't shipped in _any_ major OSes. It's available to install on all, just like most package managers, but I'm not sure it's in the default distributions of macOS, Windows, or the major Linux distros?
No package manager is. But of the ones that are installed by users, npm is probably the most popular.
What about pip? It's either installed or immediately available on many OSes
pip might be but it was historically super inconsistent (at least in my experience). Is it `pip install`? `python3 -m pip install`? maybe `pip3 install`? Yeah ubuntu did a lot of damage to pip here. npm always worked because you had to install it and it didnt have a transition phase from python2 being in the OS by default.
system pip w/ sudo usually unleashes Zalgo, i’d rather curl | bash but npm is fine too. it’s just about meeting people where they’re at, and in the ai age many devs have npm
if you build for the web, no matter what your backend is (python, go, rust, java, c#), your frontend will almost certainly have some js, so likely you need npm.
`pip install` either doesn’t work out of the box or has the chance to clobber system files though
This is about eight years old. The python situation has mostly gotten worse since https://xkcd.com/1987/
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