I've only used Python occasionally, and more than half of that time I ran into issues with the installed Python version or dependencies. Not only version 2 vs 3, but for example a certain project required exactly 3.11, not 3.10 or 3.12. Last time, I tried to install Caddy and broke all previously installed packages/commands - and after searching for a solution and trying different things, the best I could come up with was to switch versions (manually) before and after running a command to restore the environment.

Now I understand I should have been using Pyenv the whole time. But it sure felt unfriendly for a newcomer to the language/ecosystem. Granted my learning approach is to jump in without much preparation, I wish the language designers or the ecosystem provided a better experience when things don't work right.

How is it awful on the Ruby side? In my experience it is a solved problem since bundler was invented 15 years ago. It's been very free from pain during the last 10 years or so.

In my experience, python has been far, far worse than ruby. Now, to be fair, I’m much more comfortable in the ruby ecosystem, but still, everything feels much more brittle in python package management.

It's inevitable for non-dead interpreted languages.

What's wrong with rvm?

can I interest you in R?