[Wowfunhappy]

> This answer implies all "python" binaries across all operating systems and distributions for all time, are backwards and forwards compatible, no work needed. Guaranteed 100% equivalent.

Practically speaking, how does using env versus the absolute path make this any better or worse? You as the script author don't know what version of Python/Ruby/Bash/etc lives in /usr/bin. Maybe you could do some kind of automagic detection based on the user's OS, but any such assumptions are likely to go stale over time.

All env does is give users a choice about where to put their binaries. The versioning situation is a real problem, but I don't think using env makes it better or worse.