From how I interpret the linked article, it's not about language features, but the willingness of people to embrace/challenge better ideas that might not be mainstream.

    And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know.

I might suggest Haskell (re-emergent of pure functional, but statically typed) and Go (improved type system but without resorting to language lawyering and re-emergence of coroutines (besides Lua)).