Posit offers something similar to Microsoft’s CRAN Time Machine, but it works not only for CRAN, but also for Bioconductor and PyPI. You can add a date to the Public Posit Package Manager URL to access a snapshot of all packages from that day.
This was the main reason I wrote promptdown. I want to be able to edit the full chat history every turn, and the append-only standard chat interfaces don't make that easy.
The Python interop is in the blog post because it makes for convenient and compact examples, not because it motivated any of the features.
If you're interested in what motivated S7, you may enjoy this talk Hadley gave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3FxCvSueag (R7 was the working name for the package at the time)
R does have namespaces. Take a look at the NAMESPACE file found at the root of every R package, which defines the symbols and methods exported by the package.
> which defines the symbols and methods exported by the package
Which are all dumped into the one single global namespace regardless if you want everything or not.
I can't remember the exact number, but tidyverse package imports literally thousands of things into your global namespace on package load, coupled with any other dependencies and you have a hell of a time figuring out where any function or constant came from.
For example: https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/2025-03-02
You can browse available snapshot dates here: https://packagemanager.posit.co/client/#/repos/cran/setup?sn...
This also works for PyPI and Python packages: https://packagemanager.posit.co/pypi/2025-03-04/simple