From my experience (experienced in Rust and cargo and bouncing off OCaml a number of times due to OPAM), I was pretty about what switches were and how things were not sandboxed to my project folder by default. I’d be trying to build something and have to blow away my global state every time I tried to build another project. I tried using switches (as it seemed like the approach for sandboxing) but this seemed cumbersome and hard to understand for building individual projects – say, a project I’d pulled from Github and just wanted to try out quickly.
This translation is incredibly helpful, even if it is difficult to remember and teach – it’s only now I’m learning that I need a separate tool for project sandboxing (ie. direnv)? I definitely don’t think Cargo is perfect, and I don’t mind the build-system/package manager separation, but I do think there could be a lot that could be done to set people up for success. This is good for beginners and experts alike!