[lmm]

> 1. I feel like most of the desire for a static language is to know what type something is. Is C++ exactly as brief as Python? No, as I think you've demonstrated. But I think you're a lot more likely to know the type of something.

Sure, but you don't have to choose between them, there are plenty of languages where you can have both Pythonic terseness and full type safety. E.g. Scala:

    (for {k <- somelist} yield (k.weight, k.name)).sorted.reverse

Many other strongly typed (ML-like) functional languages are similar.