On the other hand, many important things move at a grinding pace in Python. Packaging and performance are two major issues for just about everyone I’ve spoken with who uses Python in a serious capacity, and these have been notorious problems for decades with no end in sight. Most of this seems to boil down to an unwillingness to encourage the ecosystem towards a narrower packaging format (“sorry, downloading a package and running setup.py just to determine the dependency set is insane and we’re going to deprecate that going forward”) or a narrower C extension interface that would be compatible with more aggressive optimizations. There’s value in stability, but if the governance model can’t pass these kinds of slow, steady changes for paramount issues, then perhaps new languages shouldn’t look to Python as a model for a well-governed language.

I would suggest Rust—I’m not a fanboy by any means, but Rust is a large, rapidly growing project that is unparalleled with respect to its rate of improvement as far as I’m concerned. I know recommending Rust for things is a cliche (esp “rewrite it in Rust”), but I would defy anyone to find a better governed language.