Comment by walterlw
12 hours ago
I believe that Python is as popular and widely used as it is because it's old enough to have an expansive ecosystem of libraries. It's easy enough to implement one in pure Python and possible to optimize it later (Pydantic is a great recent-ish example, switching to a Rust core for 2.0). That same combination of Python + (choose a compiled language) makes it quite difficult for any new language to tap into the main strength of Python.
Python is popular because of it's expansive ecosystem of libraries, which only exist because the language is duck typed. If it was statically typed, the expansive ecosystem of libraries wouldn't exist.
There is a factor of 3x difference in dev speed between the two typing systems.
It's not just its age, it's how easy it is (was?) to jump in and start writing useful code that could be revisited later on and be able to read it and understand it again.
All of these efforts to turn it into another Typescript are going to, in the end, kill the ease of use it has always had.