I suspect smart people could fix the nightmare around dependencies and packaging for less than 3M, and the economic gains would be immeasurable.

Agreed[0].

[0] https://python-poetry.org

cmd -f rust. Nope. C. Nope. Headers. Nope. Meson. Nope.

Poetry doesn't handle the hard part of packaging, which is getting compiled dependencies working on approximately 50 different combinations of platform, architecture, version, and so on.

Python is of course a major boon to humanity, but the things that need funding are typically things that corporations aren't using. It's our reliance on private spokes of technology (think: app stores & sales platforms, operating systems, hardware designs, etc) that are major risks to the long-term stability of our society and economy.

Those are open ended problems though.

Something like python's GIL issue is something with a clear end game. It just needs resources.

I mean, MOJO has 100 million in funding and is 'supposedly' building a faster and better python.

Programming improvements are all about hiring a small group of highly talented engineers. Funding a lab of 10 tenured R1 level PL researchers to work on python fulltime will likely cost $5 million/yr and should be more than enough for whatever 'leap forwards' people want to facilitate.