> a language that has a working == operator
== has always been working in PHP. I know maybe that optional type coercition trips up some noobs occasionally before they made any effort to learn the language (hint === doesn't coerce types for equality), but how low effort does a complaint have to be?
Type coercition is actually pretty cool when you're not really sure what the browser or client is about to http at you and you just want it to work. It's much better than crashing at runtime because '12' isn't a number. If you're input isn't sane, throw an exception or use a validation library.
Now if we're talking about a good type system that can be enforced at compile time like rust, Scala, etc. Sign me up. But if it's run time, it's run time, we gotta keep going.
Remember BML, bradfitz' attempt to do this with Perl?
I would love to see someone do something similar for Python.