Summary

  • One big limitations of Python is that only one version of a package can be installed in a given environment.
  • Virtual environments allow us to create multiple python environments, isolated from each other. Therefore we don’t worry about breaking other projects that may rely on other versions of some packages.
  • Having one virtual environment per analysis is a good research practice since it faciliates reproducibility of your results.
  • Never use the system python installation, unless your have a very good reason to.