As a Python developer, I just stay with pip and virtualenv, but I share the smh/wtf sentiment here. The data science folks enjoy conda but I don't see that being useful to me anywhere else. I feel like every other year someone will invent a new pip env.

pyvenv (see comment section, edited) is now deprecated and venv is recommended (shipped as part of Python 3.6 installation) is another confusion. Lest not forget the confusion of distuilts and setuptools is like argparse vs optparse in the past (which are both horrible). The experience of using pip and pypi (now Warehouse) is much better than that of Ruby and of NodeJS, but these "2-in-1" tools are just ridiculously "creative".

As always, pro-tip: consider using the following to ensure environment is loaded properly when you are deploying production

    /full_path/env/bin/python myapp.py --workers=3

over

    source /full_path/env/activate && python myapp.py --workers=3

The latter is fine when you are doing local development in your terminals.

If you go on #python IRC channel, every year a group of helpers will collectively recommend one of the above and then perhaps a different one the following year, so please do yourself a favor, just stick to pip and virtualenv.