Comment by chuckadams

I remember falling in love with Python when I first learned it at version 1.5, liked it even more with 2.0, but when 3.0 came around, that's when I noticed the ecosystem falling apart. Not for the obvious incompatibility schism: I do think most of 3.0's changes were good ones, and it finally is the standard default version now, but in many other ways it feels like the ecosystem has still never really recovered. Virtualenv is still the same grotesque hack, where rather than doing what other languages like Perl and Ruby do and making some wrapper around setting PYTHONPATH, it relies on python's behavior of locating the library path relative to the install, thus hardlinking a whole python installation in and making you "activate" it first. That nothing has managed to replace it in 20 years speaks volumes.