Debian stable is a very very stable distribution, as such packages can be extremely outdated. He could compile or get it another way but that can be annoying.
It's par-for-the-course to "brew install" random stuff on a dev box. You lose a lot when you ditch distro-packaged Python and start relying on varying third-party schemes to drop something that may-or-may not be getting security updates and may-or-may-not have been compiled against the same libraries as the ones on your production system.
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