[StableAlkyne]

> Specifically, bundler allows side-by-side version installs and the program simply loads the version specified in the bundle.lock

I'm surprised Python hasn't caught up to that. At best you can use Anaconda, but in order to have multiple versions of the same library, you end up having to create a new environment, which is another Python installation.

There are currently some nasty dependency issues caused by 3.11->3.12 breaking back compatibility in the standard library around the build system, alongside Numpy just kinda deciding semver doesn't matter between 1.20 and 2.0, that breaking changes don't warrant a major version bump if they tagged a deprecation warning on it. You just have to know their version scheme isn't really semver when pinning versions, which is lame of them, because ignoring that expectation has caused so many downstream breakages in the last couple of years.

So much could be solved if you could just say "this version of this package" in a dependency and not have to worry about compatibility on a completely different package

[akx]

> So much could be solved if you could just say "this version of this package" in a dependency

This can be done in the JS/TS world. It also occasionally breaks horribly in the JS/TS world. You might have multiple incompatible versions of a package in the tree when one dependency depends on one particular version, and the rest of your universe depends on another. It gets even worse when `Symbol`s come to play, since they'll be unique between those two versions.