I was going to write a long description of the “writing a script (with dependencies)” use case, but it occurred to me that @njs described this a lot better, back in 2018, with this post.
I think Python tooling currently focuses mostly on the “Reusable Library” section of this, with some help for the rest of section 3. But we tend to ignore sections 1 (“Beginner”) and 2 (“Sharing with others”). Those two early phases are where people have “a bunch of scripts in a Work directory” and where a formal project directory is more overhead than they want. And as a sidenote, I think that referring to stage 1 as “beginner” is misleading - I’ve been using Python for years and I still find that most of my work is in this category.
It’s standalone scripts with dependencies that I care about. They are the case that is badly supported right now IMO. These are often all dumped into a single directory, so PEP 582 doesn’t fully address this. The pip-run tool helps, but it reinstalls dependencies for every run, which can be painful.
I’d like a “unified vision” to cover this use case as well, and not just the “create a Python project” workflow.