What best practices do I teach to complete beginners to Python? I am teaching adult beginners and it would be best to avoid the messy parts in the beginning.

What best practices do I teach to complete beginners to Python? I am teaching adult beginners and it would be best to avoid the messy parts in the beginning. I thought I could get by with just pip and briefly touching on virtualenv. I sin myself by avoiding all the mess by cloning a full bare bones Lubuntu virtualization whenever I need a clean project. Theoretically Docker should suffice but it is yet another layer of complexity.