Like many of you, I work on a lot of different projects. Even when a project
is less serious—hey, I should check out this new JS framework!—I
strive to reduce the friction involved with setting up the project's dev
environment to the absolute bare minimum possible.
This sounds really good if you need packages or something like that set up, but honestly, most people will be perfectly fine with asdf. It doesn’t need to start an environment or load anything. It just makes the shims for your tools active for the current directory, and it doesn’t require .env files, it doesn’t require dealing with package managers. It simply is a file where each line is the name of the tool and the version. That’s it. And it just works. Every time. Unless it’s Python. Fucking Python.