Sure, I didn’t take that negatively.

Let me start with facts:

- npm actually downloads multiple copies of each library, when needed to satisfy conflicting version requirements. - this is only possible due toruntime features of JavaScript. In most languages like C this causes symbol collisions. - I think this is a problem in Common Lisp too due to packages being global. Maybe there is a fancy way to rebuild packages at load time. - this is why the Debian style release makes sense. Either everything loads together, or not.

Opinions - I want to know all my dependencies. I treat them as my own source, so tar downloaded is close to my mental model. - For c projects I usually have a make file with curl commands tied to exactly url. If I want to update I manually change the url. - quicklisp already has a nice way to make an isolated folder just containing your code and its dependencies to be loaded with asdf. It gets out of the way once you have downloaded your libraries.

Yes, that "feature" of npm isn't something you'll find elsewhere. It's not inherent to the problem of version resolution. Just about anywhere else you'll just get an error message that the version resolution isn't possible, if there's no available combination to satisfy all the requirements.

That one design attribute of npm probably more any other feels like they did it because they could, not because it was a particularly good idea.