A friend of mine was recently taking a course on machine learning and she had to use Python with some packages for the homework assignments. She downloaded VSCode and installed Python on her machine and then attempted to get the packages installed with pip. They weren’t showing up in the VSCode terminal though. Somehow she had six different installations of Python, one of Python 3 living inside of a VSCode namespace, one each of Python 2 and 3 living in a global location, and one each of Python 2 and 3 living in a user-specific location, and a Python installed by Anaconda. Calling python, python3, pip, and pip3 in all went to different Python installations. The VSCode installation didn’t seem to have pip at all, even with python -m pip. I managed to eventually sort it all out for her, but it took me over two hours to figure it out, and I’m a professional programmer who uses Python in my daily job. I admittedly don’t use Windows everyday, but it was a huge mess and I have no idea how it happened.

Computers are complex, and people who don’t work closely with them daily can easily get very confused.