But nowadays people seem to put the cart before the horse, and try to teach about programming language ecosystems before they've properly taught about programming. People new to programming need to worry about programming first. If there are any concepts they need to learn before syntax and debugging, it's how to use a command line (because it'll be harder to drive tools otherwise; IDEs introduce greater complexity) and how to use version control (so they can make mistakes fearlessly).
Educators, my plea: if you teach required basic skills to programmers before you actually teach programming, then those skills are infinitely more important than modern "dependency management". And for heavens' sake, you can absolutely think of a few months' worth of satisfying lesson plans that don't require wrapping one's head around full-scale data-science APIs, or heaven forbid machine-learning libraries.
If you need any more evidence of the proper priorities, just look at Stack Overflow. It gets flooded with zero-effort questions dumping some arcane error message from the bowels of Tensorflow, forwarded from some Numpy 2d arrays used as matrices having the wrong shape - and it'll get posted by someone who has no concept of debugging, no idea of any of the underlying ML theory, and very possibly no idea what matrix multiplication is or why it's useful. What good is it to teach "dependency management" to a student who's miles away from understanding the actual dependencies being managed?
For that matter, sometimes they'll take a screenshot of the terminal instead of copying and pasting an error message (never mind proper formatting). Sometimes they even use a cell phone to take a picture of the computer monitor. You're just not going to teach "dependency management" successfully to someone who isn't properly comfortable with using a computer.
