I won't bother replying to most of what you said (bit tired), just this one here: > Third, how (as a user) am I supposed to reliably install and start a Python

I won't bother replying to most of what you said (bit tired), just this one here: > Third, how (as a user) am I supposed to reliably install and start a Python software system-wide? With a whole `virtualenv`, or with a script that activates it every time? And what if you want to use one python program to run another python program and one is using python2 and other python3 etc? :D You don't need to activate a virtualenv to run an application from it. Eg. some_virtualenv/bin/some_binary just works, regardless of other active virtualenvs or what Python/Java/C program invokes that. And maybe this bit here: > So you want to say that some arcane chain of commands that I have to remember is as good as `cargo run` to run `cargo install name` to install? The commands he mentioned would be used to create a new project, not to install anything.