This should be read in the context of the next article (https://paulromer.net/environment-as-code/) for full understanding.

That said, I'm not a huge fan of the approach described. It's leaning a bit too much on Wittgenstein's Ladder for my taste, but more importantly it's putting concepts out of order. The article seems to dismiss virtual environments as more complex, but they really aren't that bad - they're honestly easier to work with than the approach the author discovered organically, of creating "real" environments by repeatedly reinstalling Python and setting up dependencies from a requirements.txt file. This glosses over the hard part of populating the requirements.txt file, while also not building the necessary conceptual framework to understand dependency graphs (and thus lockfiles).

I was especially bothered by the fact that this advises blindly moving a file around using the GUI without trying to understand the purpose of that file, and describing what Anaconda does as "taking over the system". While I'm sure that works, if students are in the position described then they should learn fundamental developer skills first. I.e.:

> There is a lot to learn when you are getting started. Try out virtual environments later, when you are ready. If you do not know how to edit a file, run a command from the terminal, and have pip install libraries from a requirements.txt file, you are not ready.

It takes mere minutes to learn these skills, and they should have been taught way before exposing the student to anything that actually justifies setting up Anaconda. There are countless interesting projects for students that don't require third-party libraries at all, let alone the SciPy stack (and even that installs just fine with Pip nowadays anyway).

It's also indefensible, IMO, to say:

> python3.11 and python3.12 are examples of major versions.

> python3.12.4 and python3.12.5 are minor versions.

While I understand the impetus ("Python 3 is the brand now"), this is simply incorrect, and incompatible with how every relevant extant piece of documentation uses the terms (including for tools like Pip that will immediately become relevant to the student).