I think it's a gross exaggeration to say that a package manager makes so much difference between an easy-to-use language and a difficult-to-use language. It's not such an ordeal to get started on a software project in most programming languages.

In Smalltalk, there's hardly any effort at all! Just open a Smalltalk image and start coding!

Most of your time spent in programming will be in coding, testing and debugging. A good deal of time will also be spent in reading documentation for libraries.