[aaronbwebber]

I think Python's primary use case has now shifted far enough from scripting to server-side web development that ~35 ms of startup time to deal with Unicode better is a worthwhile tradeoff for the majority of Python users.

It does raise an interesting question about whether there is now an opening for a new scripting language to develop. I don't think any of the well-known languages developed in the last ~10 years have been what you might call "scripting" languages.

[Skunkleton]

I am not knocking python here at all, just pointing out that it doesn't work well for some tasks. I wonder if the startup latency could be fixed though?