[new_hackers]

this +1000

The python users I've encountered fall generally into two camps:

1) The engineer/scientist/researcher/hacker type that has python installed on their snowflake machine, and has a whole bunch of packages installed to make their flavor of snowcones. These users just want python to work, find joy in the syntax, and in general get their work done.

2) the developer that is trying to deploy the same thing to many machines. This is a pain. Often you end up with users from camp 1 trying to do this and you end up with a global python install with batteries and the kitchen sink included that is a dependency for a whole bunch of "server" apps. you update a package (because "my special snowcone needs it") and you break something else that you didn't know to test. This is a nightmare. With pip and venv it is easier to manage this, but I still see that relocatable venv is "experimental" when you read the help. IMHO, the python 3 community needs to make it very, very easy to distribute and deploy my special snowcone maker and all its dependencies to a system without python already installed, and not stomp on anybody elses snowcone maker in the process.