It always seems so backwards to me when I use Python... and kinda crazy to see in a "beginner" language.

I've always felt that it's weird that Python is considered a "beginner" language. Yeah, it uses "and" instead of "&&", but it took me a loooonnng time to figure out how to manage dependencies when I was starting out (and then figuring out how to deploy to targets, how to do reproducible builds, etc). Compared with Rust or Go which just do the right thing by default (personally I've always felt that the tooling is the way more important problem than language concepts which often feel like bike shedding to me).

I also despair that it's used as a beginner language. There are so many better options. I even include Java in that list.

So why is it used? As it has a fantastic eco-system for applied statistics / machine learning / various math things. If you're teaching an introduction to programming then it's a very effective language.

That and once people progress it's decent - much prefer the code written in Python by competent developers to that written in Java or even Go. It also sets people up to use more robust languages such as C# or (for those with a Math background) Haskell.

>It should just work when I navigate to the project folder.

You still need to do the setup when you create the project, but once you do you can use direnv[0] to activate/deactivate the venv[1]. I target GCP often, so I have direnv switch over to the correct project [3] also.

[0] https://direnv.net/

[1] https://stackabuse.com/managing-python-environments-with-dir...

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56781493/gcloud-is-it-po...

Going to second direnv. It + pyenv really resolved so many of my Python issues

I have a couple lines in my bashrc that activate the local venv when I cd into a directory.

I find myself doing `cd .` a lot.