This talk will present a high-level, consistent view of the properties of programming languages that are relevant to the design of language package (dependency) managers - and the communities that form around them. The talk is drawn from my experience in leading the efforts around Go's package management, and the ongoing and evolving efforts to take language package management from an incidental thing that languages "just have," up to a domain of inquiry and engineering that is about programming languages, but also independent of them (much like compilers). Writing I have already done (https://medium.com/@sdboyer/so-you-want-to-write-a-package-manager-4ae9c17d9527) is considered by a lot of folks who work in this area to be foundational in this new phase; I hope to have a number of new thoughts and writing to present by the time FOSDEM 2018 comes around.