It is a bit more of a pain to work with than similar features in other languages. Like as far as I know you can't just move a venv, you have to rebuild it in the new place. Whereas `node_modules` is just a dir. Also, there is a weird layering where venv abstracts away installed eggs/wheels/whatever they're calling them these days, but then since that's still painful to work with, you need another layer on top like virtualenvtools or burrito or whatever it is. (Sorry, it's been a couple years so my memory is fuzzy)

"a bit"? honestly I would say it's much closer to a lot more pain

I was being kind. :)

Yeah, Python's environment/import logic is really convoluted. It evolved organically with little forethought, and only got a minimal pruning with Python 3.

It was essentially created by one dude no?

As someone who has largely moved from Python to Node: it's not the concept of project-local packages that is the problem. It's virtualenv's awful implementation and UI.

Maybe I've got Stockholm Syndrome but I never have any trouble with pip. I don't find it any worse than npm for my usage patterns.

I'm one of those people who are really confused about the whole Python project management situation. Is there a resource where I can learn the equivalent of common operations found in other project management tools such as npm / yarn / cargo?

E.g. is there something like 'cargo run' that just checks that the required python version is installed (I got the impression that this can be specified somewhere), installs deps if they're not installed yet and then runs the main module? Or something like 'npm install --save' that adds the latest version of a package you already know the name of as a dependency and installs it?

Tried conda or pipenv?

Have them try Pipenv!

https://github.com/kennethreitz/pipenv

While virtualenv management isn't that difficult, Pipenv is VERY intuitive.

There are still widely used packages that don't work with pip, like PyQt.