I've used python for roughly 15 years, and 10 of those years I was paid to primarily write and maintain projects written in Python.

Things got bearable with virtualenv/virtualenv wrappers, but it was never what I would call great. Pip was always painful, and slow. I never looked forward to using them - and every time I worked on a new system - the amount of finaggling I had to do to avoid problems, and the amount of time I spent supporting other people who had problems was significant.

The day I first used uv (about is as memorable to me as the the day I first started using python (roughly 2004) - everything changed.

I've used uv pretty much every single day since then and the joy has never left. Every operation is twitch fast. There has never once been any issues. Combined with direnv - I can create projects/venvs on the fly so quickly I don't even bother using it's various affordances to run projects without a venv.

To put it succinctly - uv gives me two things.

One - zero messing around with virtualenvwrappers and friends. For whatever reason, I've never once run into an error like "virtualenvwrapper.sh: There was a problem running the initialization hooks."

Two - fast. It may be the fastest software I've ever used. Everything is instant - so you never experience any type of cognitive distraction when creating a python project and diving into anything - you think it - and it's done. I genuinely look forward to uv pip install - even when it's not already in cache - the parallel download is epically fast - always a joy.