Yep. Python stopped being Python a decade ago. Now there are just innumberable Pythons. Perl... on the otherhand, you can still run any perl script from any time on any system perl interpreter and it works! Granted, perl is unpopular and not getting constant new features re: hardcore math/computation libs.

Anyway, I think I'll stick with Festival 1.96 for TTS. It's super fast even on my core2duo and I have exactly zero chance of getting this Python 3'ish script to run on any machine with an OS older than a handful of years.

It breaks my heart that Perl fell out of favor. Perl “6” didn’t help in the slightest.

Debian pretty much "solved" this by making pip refuse to install packages if you are not in an venv.

It needed distro buy in and implementation, but this is from the Python side: https://peps.python.org/pep-0668/

IIRC that's actually a change in upstream pip.

Well, with my python 3.13.5 not even that works!

Pretty impressive but this seems to be a staple of most AI/ML projects.

"Works on my machine" or "just use docker", although here the later doesn't even seem to be an option.

Ditto OpenSUSE, at least on Tumbleweed

Using venv won't save you from having the wrong version of the actual Python interpreter installed.

venvs can be attached to arbitrary interpreters.