I kinda hope we can just let Python be Python: it’s in a global-ish maximum for what it’s for, and I suspect any big move away from that will make it worse overall.
Obviously things like UTF-8 support, or maybe getting a clean lexical scope option, or other “fixes” are good. Performance improvements are good.
But there are lots of mainstream languages that have mature static type systems, strong metaprogramming facilities, higher performance, or all of the above.
I’d way rather see effort go into getting the package management thing figured out, or the static analysis stuff improved further than any big movement in the language proper.
Nit: Python has strong metaprogramming facilities since version 2.2, when "types" and "classes" were made equal, and it became trivial to create a class using the `type` function. It's so easy exactly because Python is so dynamic.
I still think python has a ton of headroom to grow. It's maxing out the data science space, and it does reasonably well in the web service space, but they really have not pushed very far into the distributable GUI and CLI space. Dependency, packaging, and distribution have been improving in leaps and bounds still for python, and type-hinting makes large projects manageable.
Obviously things like UTF-8 support, or maybe getting a clean lexical scope option, or other “fixes” are good. Performance improvements are good.
But there are lots of mainstream languages that have mature static type systems, strong metaprogramming facilities, higher performance, or all of the above.
I’d way rather see effort go into getting the package management thing figured out, or the static analysis stuff improved further than any big movement in the language proper.
Just my 2c.