If you spend 2 minutes googling it (or even just reading HN comments here), you'll get various people recommending venv, pyenv, poetry, conda, pyflow and probably a whole bunch of deprecated stuff, where it's totally unclear to outsiders which one to use.

Fwiw if you are an outsider, having gone through this exact issue myself recently start with venv: https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html

It is a standard library module and serves as the base functionality, most the other things you list are third party tools that build on the venv concept in various ways.

Once you grok venv, you will be in a position to understand if those tools can provide value to your particular situation.

I wanted to install python on a new Mac last night and just couldn’t get up and running. Closest I got was with using anaconda but although I could get the right env in the terminal I couldn’t get either paycharm or vscode to pick up the correct interpreter/packages etc.

I’d almost guarantee there was something simple I was missing but for someone not familiar with the ecosystem getting python set up to do more than just hello world is a shitshow.

virtualenv, pyenv, venv.. I'm sure they all work well, but for a newbie, the sheer choice is a killer, especially when they all work almost same, but not quite.

Now compare that with cargo or npm and the canonical way makes newbie upbringing SL much easier.

Took the words out of my mouth. Let’s not over complicate things.