All environments for computer development need to manage some amount of abstraction to bootstrap that environment and get programs to run. In nixes, it's the bo

All environments for computer development need to manage some amount of abstraction to bootstrap that environment and get programs to run. In nixes, it's the bootloader, the kernel, and shell (with its ENV). When you issue the command `node` to a computer, what does that actually mean? Your Delphi setup probably just hid most of that abstraction from you, the way most people need not worry about the bootloader. But env is kind of unavoidable. It's like the Construct from the Matrix. The staging area for all other programs. I have struggled a lot with the nitty-gritty of ENV over the past few years and I agree with you that maybe there is a better way. /etc/, Conda, virtualenv, docker, ROS, Windows registry, they all deal heavily with managing the environment, and all have their own thorns. Then you have kube, consul, ansible, and all the fun of distributed environments. The bottom line is, if you want multiple, orthogonal runtimes, you need an abstraction for managing namespaces. PATH is actually one of the simplest mechanisms to achieve this.