Could you be a bit more specific about what you mean by "You could learn how to use python"? What resources would you recommend to learn how to work around problems the OP has? What basic procedures/resources can you recommend to "learn python"? I work as a software developer alongside my studies and often face the same problems as OP that I would like to avoid. Very grateful for any tips!

Basically just use virtual environments via the venv module. The only thing you really need to know is that Python doesn't support having multiple versions of a package installed in the same environment. That means you need to get very familiar with creating (and destroying) environments. You don't need to know any of this if you just use tools that happen to be written in Python. But if you plan to write Python code then you do. It should be in Python books really, but they tend to skip over the boring stuff.

How do you learn anything in the space of software engineering? In general, there are many different problems and even more solutions with different tradeoffs.

To avoid spending hours on fixing broken environments after a single "pip install", I would make it easy to rollback to a known state. For example, recreate virtualenv from a lock requirements file stored in git: `pipenv sync` (or corresponding command using your preferred tool).

Oh wow, I’ve been a Python engineer for over a decade and getting dependencies right for machine learning has very little to do with Python and everything to do with c++/cuda

I've done it. Isn't it just following instructions? What part of that means destroying every mention of Python on the system?

I've been programming with python for decades and the problem they are describing says more about the disastrous state of python's package management and the insane backwards compatibility stance python devs have.

Half of the problems I've helped some people solve stem from python devs insisting on shuffling std libraries around between minor versions.

Some libraries have a compatibility grid with different python minor versions, because how often they break things.