> Can this happen in any language? Sure. Play with enough deep, dark stuff and I'm sure you can can unleash run-time equivalents of nasal demons anywhere. Also

> Can this happen in any language? Sure. Play with enough deep, dark stuff and I'm sure you can can unleash run-time equivalents of nasal demons anywhere. Also databases, caches, REST APIs, syscalls (e.g. libc), docker, dependent libraries, browsers and much much more.... In spite of that I don't see it as being an intrinsically difficult problem to solve. Just make a best effort to run the same versions of stuff in dev and test as you do in prod (with python, pyenv and dependency pinning is your friend here) and make liberal use of sanity checks - if it's only tested on versions x->y, put in a check that fails with a message if it sees anything else. The main problem isn't that ^^ that is hard, it's just that nobody really does it or recognizes how much time can be saved by doing it.