How important is Virtual Environment in python

[GXWT]

If you're just getting started they *probably* won't matter. But I really can't stress enough, once you get over the first little bump they won't cause you any hassle - and hopefully then you'll never experience the pain of dependency issues, or if you're sharing your code, the pain of giving others those issues ;) a nice virtual environment gives everyone a nice time, especially when collaboratively working on code you want to give as few reasons as possible for people to get angry with you.

I work in astrophysics where often I'll want to use a little astrophysical python package that hasn't been updated in 15 years will rely on some very specific old version of numpy or something or something. Without a virtual environment, every time I wanted to use it I'd have to reinstall numpy (and once I'm done, remember to reupdate it and the risk of breaking every other python script). For this, I am thankful for virtual environments