I don’t find Python’s virtualenvs to be as cumbersome as Tim Hopper, especially when combined with virtualenvwrapper, but his argument for using Anaconda environments is compelling:
In 2015, I have almost exclusively used Python installations provided through Continuum Analytics’s Conda/Anaconda platform. I have also switched from using virtualenvs to using conda environments, and I am loving it.
The only contra is that pip and virtualenv are so widely distributed and easily deployed with distro packages that they’re somewhat safe to rely on. Conda, not so much, even though it’s a light lift and spreading.
Interestingly, I probably overlapped with some of Tim’s Qadium colleagues on a DARPA program.