Setting Up Python

i am still new to python and really need some help understanding an issue i am facing. I have supposedly installed python3 successfully and i have ran a couple of projects with pyt

Solution 1:

You have a system-installed python3 (probably 3.8.2 if you are on Big Sur) in /usr/bin/python3 and a Homebrew-installed one in /usr/local/bin/python3 which is a symlink to the real location where brew installed it. This is all quite normal, though if the system-installed Python 3 was sufficient for your needs, installing another copy with Homebrew was redundant as such. But this is all quite normal; your system needs a particular version to exist, and you should not touch that, but you are free to install a non-system version in parallel and use that for your personal needs if you want to.

You can use the explicit paths to run any particular version (try /usr/bin/python3 --version and /usr/local/bin/python3 --version) but usually you don't want or need to. Out of the box, your PATH is ordered so that /usr/local/bin takes precedence over /usr/bin, so that locally installed versions shadow the system default versions in regular use.

As an aside, you have the Visual Studio Code path added twice, and you don't need to export PATH multiple times (or actually at all, as the system startup files will already have marked this variable for export).