> that suggests that the standard for what constitutes a valuable quantity of functionality is 7.5X lower in the JS community.
Err, does it? The first thing this suggests is that the JS community is 7.5x larger (true for Ruby, even larger factor for Perl and not true for Pyhthon [1]). The second thing this suggests to me is that npm is X times more usable than those languages package managers, which from my experience true for Python (not for Ruby though, dunno about Perl).
I'm not trying be argumentative, but I honestly don't see how you conclude that 7.5x more packages === 7.5x more usuable.
I don't have a huge amount of experience with pip or artisan, but they seemed roughly similar to both rpm and bundler in terms of concept and operation. You have a file with a list of modules to require, an executable tool that downloads all of those modules and their dependencies and finally a generated file that tracks the snapshot state of all dependencies.
I don't perceive npm bringing 7.5x game to that evaluation.
Don't get me wrong: I'm thrilled that it's working for so many people. Java was officially working for people when Rails became popular, too. However, popularity is a dangerous way to measure whether something is actually objectively better. Sometimes the most popular thing really is better. And sometimes Putin is super popular. It's complicated. :)
Err, does it? The first thing this suggests is that the JS community is 7.5x larger (true for Ruby, even larger factor for Perl and not true for Pyhthon [1]). The second thing this suggests to me is that npm is X times more usable than those languages package managers, which from my experience true for Python (not for Ruby though, dunno about Perl).
1 - https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology