Python has a tremendous amount of momentum because it has become so popular outside of the traditional software development world, but other languages are picking away at it, even given that momentum. And while I am in a bubble, like everyone else, in my bubble, and those I talk to in my bubble, all see large a shift away from Python.

Adding stronger typing, like type hints, could reverse that, of course.

The reason not to is performance and reliability. Typing helps with the latter, Python is just bad at the former.

That "shift" away from Python wouldn't be seen in any particular data, right?

Major companies build things entirely in Javascript, too. Popularity doesn't mean anything. Honestly, for a small web app, I'd pick PHP / Laravel over Python. Deployment is way simpler.

What you both are experiencing is your bubbles clashing.

I have been developing almost exclusively in Python for the last 4 years (occasional C#, Java and PHP) and although my entire team disparages PHP it is really quicker and fewer characters for most stuff.

Luckily IDEs can auto add the imports, but sometimes a slightly mistyped piece of code auto adds an import I need to delete, I love avoiding imports and circular imports in PHP. The other nice thing is avoiding random python behaviour differences in MacOS, Windows and Ubuntu. Code that works fine in CircleCI but not locally. Works on a Mac but not on windows etc… I didn’t experience that with PHP.

Not sure there are a huge number of long term PHP devs who switch to Python or the other way around to have a reasonable opinion.

This is a rather uninteresting statement, as we all live in bubbles - knowledge of them helps, but really just puts you in a different bubble. Still a bubble.

I'd say all metrics point to the popularity of Python increasing, while there is no data indicating that people are fleeing Python en masse. Or at all, actually.