I'm wondering how many of the extra lines are those containing only closing bracket

I didn't mean to exaggerate. I think part of the improvement was the luxury of refactoring which should generally reduce the bloat. And, as someone else said, part of the issue is C++/Java, not static typing. When I move from Java to Python, I also get the luxury of organizing code into fewer/meaningful source files. I find this more readable, than having to switch to different files constantly.

I have not had a chance to learn or use a language like Go. But production use of Python, including building large code bases is real. We do resort to numba, cython or using Python API to compiled code.

I'm now involved in converting large codebases from SAS to Python. I don't think I will have the luxury of choosing another language like Go, for a number of reasons.

It's funny, both Java and Python emerged in the 1990s, yet Java feels incredibly crusty and awkward in 2023. I wouldn't choose Java as a fair representative of statically typed languages in 2023, but Python still feels like a reasonable choice for a non-Lisp dynamic language.