python

When presented with the instructions that guide them toward creating virtual environments in the context of our discussion of Third-Party Libraries, I've found that many students over the years have ignored them altogether, or have asked me, in so many words, "Why do I have to do this?" And, of course, I can understand that impulse; when working amongst a lot of complexity, it's healthy to want to skip some of it, thinking instead "I'll figure this out later."

Yet, despite its requirement that you wade into the waters of the command line and issue commands like python -m venv . or pip3 install pygame, I'm asking you to do it, but it's not a gratuitous thing. It solves a problem, albeit one that you might not notice that you have right away. (That's the thing about tools like these; it's not always clear initially why some of their complexity is there, which is why it's important to stop and think about it early.)

Let's assume that you never use a virtual environment. What problem might you be susceptible to, which wouldn't have affected you if you had used virtual environments instead? Two or three sentences is enough here, and if you think there are multiple problems that virtual environments solve, you don't need to list all of them; describing one of them in a little bit of depth is better than scratching the surface of more than one of them.