In my mind, conda has always been a purpose-specific environment manager for people who live in data science / matplotlib / numpy / jupyter all day every day.

In my mind, conda has always been a purpose-specific environment manager for people who live in data science / matplotlib / numpy / jupyter all day every day. Ruby-the-language is now inseparable from Rails because the venn diagram of the “Ruby” community and the “rails” community is nearly a circle. It can be hard to find help with plain Ruby because 99% of people will assume you have the rails stdlib monkeypatches. In a similar way, conda and data science seem to be conjoined, and I don’t really see anybody using conda as a general-purpose Python environment manager.