Python is old, but pip itself had its 1.0 release 8 months after Ruby's Bundler did and 6 years after Apache Maven, both of which are substantially better package managers than pip and both of which are also for 90s-era programming languages, not the new shiny ones.
Age is part of the problem, but it's not the whole problem. Ruby manages to have a package manager that everyone loves, and Java has settled on a duopoly. Meanwhile Python has someone making a serious attempt at a new package manager every few years.
pip wasn't pythons first package-manager, and obviously wasn't it just created with version 1.0. There were already years of history at that point. But yes, Ruby has a better history with packaging, similar to Perl. Python was kinda always copying Perl and then Ruby in what they did, but still aiming to preserve their own identity and requirements. Which is also why nobody wanted to copy the cargo-cult-pain of the Java-Enterprise-World.
> Meanwhile Python has someone making a serious attempt at a new package manager every few years.
Many People have many attempts at many things in many communities. Doesn't mean they are important. Heck, vim and zsh have also dozens of different package-managers, and they have less use cases and problems to solve then python.
> pip wasn't pythons first package-manager, and obviously wasn't it just created with version 1.0. There were already years of history at that point.
All the more reason it should have been so much better if it has already had time to learn from & iterate on past efforts.
Don't get my wrong, there's plenty of examples of projects ignoring well-known best practices (see the community backlash at Cargo's approach to name spacing or Homebrew loudly ignoring community feedback on FS permissions for 10+ years), but at this stage in 2024 you'd think we'd have gotten a little further than we have.
Age is part of the problem, but it's not the whole problem. Ruby manages to have a package manager that everyone loves, and Java has settled on a duopoly. Meanwhile Python has someone making a serious attempt at a new package manager every few years.