You don't have to activate the environment. I never do; it's a strictly optional convenience (it you think it's convenient).

Instead, simply run the interpreter installed in the environment when you run your app, e.g. "./my_env/bin/python my_app.py", and things will just work. No activation required, no special mode, nothing to forget.

The part about requirements.txt and installing packages could also be simplified if you did it the other way around: install first and create the requirements file from that:

  $ python3 -m venv my_env
  $ my_env/bin/pip install some-dependency
  $ my_env/bin/pip freeze >requirements.txt
  $ my_env/bin/python3 my_app.py

There you go. Setup, install and run in four steps and zero modes.

That's literally one step more, than Maven.

That's before you get to package your app...

Most of the steps you're listing take only a few seconds. They're talking about the actual management, not how long it takes you to type . venv/bin/activate

A few seconds here and a few seconds there - it's death by a thousand papercuts.

There's no community consensus - that keeps Python from advancing to where it needs to be.

I said it once and I'll say it again - Python lacks mature tooling.

You can't have death by a thousand papercuts when there are exactly three delay-papercuts adjacent to a step that takes a significant amount of time.

There are contexts where little delays matter, and you didn't pick one of those.

Maven is far more complicated and burdensome when compared to virtualenv and pip... pom.xml, what a righteous mess of XML and overly specified nonsense.

This is just to run your app, to package it - it's a whole different headache in Python.

It's literally a `mvn jar` and that's it!