Terry Chay has an interesting post on his site that wonders which language has better packages - PHP or Python?
It depends on the target utility. In the Python world, the most common package installer is pip; the PHP world didn't settle on a dominant format/installation for packages until composer, and that was relatively recently (last 4 years).
[...] So which has better packages? The answer is it depends on the domain. In nearly any language you can find an adequate package for any of your needs, but overall you will find the packages are higher quality, more up-to-date, and sometimes just better overall in the domain the language seems to target well.
He starts off by talking some about PHP and Python's origins - PHP as a web-focused language and Python as more general purpose - and how this influenced their package implementations. He then shares his opinions on which kind of packages are a more natural fit for which languages:
for data science/AI/ML applications, Python
for DevOps, relying on other tools (Puppet/Chef/Ansible/etc) is better
For server-side web-based packages, I feel PHP and Composer [are the solution]
He also includes some thoughts about other languages - Ruby, Javascript, Go - and their own package managers.
