system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I ruined my computer with poorly managed libraries. How can I start over and avoid the same mistakes?

**TLDR;** How can I install all of the libraries and languages I need in a way where I can make sure they won't interfere with each-other and will be easy to maintain and/or clean up later.


I've been using this computer all the way through high school and the first half of my undergrad and slowly, the years of installing different version of different libraries and programming languages without truly understanding what I was doing has ruined my path variables, my folder permissions, and filled my computer with trash libraries I will never use again. 

I want to start from scratch, factory resetting my computer and reinstalling only the things I care about. I'm on a Mac and I mainly use Python (Annaconda) , Java, and R.
gpt
Isolate dev suites with Docker containers, nixOS paths, BSD jails, Linux chroots, Vagrant boxes, VM's.

For particular languages such as Ruby, Node.js, Python, Java, or Go, there are tools akin to rvm for isolating by language version.