Comment by vezzy-fnord

Package managers have been done, but by and large not as well as they could be. It's unsurprising that Nix originates from an academic background. It's actually complicated work, and not really a solved problem yet.

Moreover, I'd heavily dispute that there are "no knowledge bases" for machine learning and AI. There very much is, given that the fields have a history as long as most contemporary computing. "Machine learning" in essence reflects the transition from AI being symbolic to statistical, so there's plenty of reference material on the latter and the various intersectionary disciplines like computational linguistics, data mining, computer vision and so forth. Hell, OpenCV - there's some good source information, for instance.