Most frustrations I've had with Perl/Ruby/Python have been down to inconsistent, incomplete or out-of-date packaging by the software distribution.
I've found I can mitigate most of this by using perlbrew/cpanminus, pythonbrew/pip and rvm/gem.
This adds complications when it comes to deployment - you've added additional maintenance dependencies to your servers if you don't stick with what the package manager provides... Nothing insurmountable, but keeping an eye on updates (would usually use email to notify on dated versions) and maybe having your CI system always use the latest versions of everything are possible methods. I'd like to hear better ideas, to be honest.
My background is both sysadmin and development, I think there should be no reason we can't make this all simpler for everyone.
At least in Python, the problem occurs because distros make several mistakes which build on each other. (A) insist on generating their own packages for modules (and typically, taking forever to update them). (B) not providing any kind of isolation. (C) building on top of these non-isolated modules.
What I do these days is leave the system Python 100% for the use of the distro (at most, dependencies for minor command line scripts which don't have import relationships with code I'm working on). Development occurs inside virtualenvs, production apps run inside virtualenvs. I use pip to install, remove, pin versions.
Dependency versions are really part of the app; the right versions should be pip installable inside a virtualenv, and this is just something which should be done automatically on a deploy. I don't mean you need to include the whole code for your dependencies in your project, but pinning versions is important to not having to put out fires.
You really don't want any versions to advance automatically until you have had a chance at least to run unit tests - if things are working then pin the new version. Of course, if you are using a library which never suffers regressions or API changes then you don't need to do this.
In short, the dependency list and versions should be included with the project and managed by the developers so that deploys are really a matter of creating a virtualenv (with --no-site-packages) and running pip -r requirements.txt to install the right stuff.
I've found I can mitigate most of this by using perlbrew/cpanminus, pythonbrew/pip and rvm/gem.
This adds complications when it comes to deployment - you've added additional maintenance dependencies to your servers if you don't stick with what the package manager provides... Nothing insurmountable, but keeping an eye on updates (would usually use email to notify on dated versions) and maybe having your CI system always use the latest versions of everything are possible methods. I'd like to hear better ideas, to be honest.
My background is both sysadmin and development, I think there should be no reason we can't make this all simpler for everyone.