Like many data scientists and Python developers before me, I've given up on managing my own Python builds and turned to pyenv (links to chronological posts in Towards Data Science). At various points in time, I built Python versions from source myself or used the prebuilt Framework installers on OSX, all while managing the links in `/usr/local/bin` by hand. With either of those methods, I had no problem spinning virtual environments from any of the installed versions, but most recently my PATH and me got mixed up on whether we were using Homebrew's `[email protected]` or the Framework version I had installed. Enter pyenv. If you're looking for how to set up pyenv, there are no shortage of articles or blog posts on how to install it, however, I'd recommend sticking to the official documentation. As some of these articles mention, there are many ways to get Python on your OSX systems:

• There's the built in Python 2.7.x (note: Python 2 is deprecated as of Dec 2019).
• Homebrew will provide a Python 3 build to satisfy it's own dependencies.
• You could have the Framework versions.
• You could have built it from source.
• Or as many would recommend, you can use pyenv to manage the versions.

Your system needs the built-in, and Homebrew is really only going to keep a single version of Python 3 for you, so you need to pick between the last three if you want to manage specific versions of Python 2 or 3. I omitted Anaconda since I haven't needed it or taken the time to really understand how it works, but I have heard success stories for Windows users. Here, we'll choose pyenv to manage python versions, but in doing so, we'll initially have multiple versions of both Python 2 and Python 3 on our system (those from pyenv in addition to the builtin version 2 and homebrew version 3). Again, there's nothing we can do with the Python 2 builtin, OSX needs it. For Python 3, we can have Homebrew use one of pyenv's Python versions to eliminate that source of redundancy. Before we get started, it's worth noting that you're unlikely to experience conflicts between pyenv and homebrew if you use your `PATH` like pyenv recommends, and Homebrew warns against it; you're wading into the territory of relying on your own understanding to support this use case (as Homebrew states in their post).