[kstrauser]

That’s exactly how NPM works, and how Cargo works by default. You can make npm install stuff globally, but that’s not recommended except for things like CLI tooling. Cargo builds every project in its own separate targets/ directory unless you manually configure it to share that dir between builds. In both cases, the default is to isolate your current project from everything else on the system.

The main difference is that Python use to make you have to know that the virtualenv existed. Now `uv run` and `poetry run` abstract that away so you don’t have to interact with it if you don’t want to.

[DrScientist]

I understand it's meme that operates well outside python - python seems particularly bad due to many packages having system dependencies in addition to package to package dependencies.

I'm just speculating that's it's a self reinforcing pattern - compatibility problems leads to isolated builds, which reduces peoples concern for backwards compatibility, which makes isolated builds ever more important.

Maybe it's fine - a trade off that allows greater velocity of development, it just seems attention to backwards compatibility is becoming a thing of the past.