[seanmclo]

At this point, another big benefit of Python is its huge number of libraries. This is really attractive to lots of people who also want static type checking.

Oftentimes, the benefits of using Python in a code base that would benefit from static typing outweigh the costs. Especially when tools like MyPy exist, which aren't perfect but help tremendously.

[nonameiguess]

This can't be emphasized enough. I'm presently pushing mypy and type hints hard in a Python project (passing static analysis and type checks is required to get through the CI pipeline) and it's just a compromise. Honestly, I don't want a dynamic duck-typed language at all, but it is what it is. Right now, the single most important factor determining whether we have any future at all is speed to market, not the increased reliability you get from type safety. And Python just has libraries for basically everything. It's enabled us to spin up brand new services that do exactly what we need to do from scratch in a matter of hours sometimes.

With competing priorities like that, this is the best we can do right now. The other factor is the rest of the team is already familiar with Python. They're mostly infrastructure developers. They're more likely to do everything in Bash if given the choice. I'm not going to teach them Scala or Haskell or Rust in the next three weeks before we need to deliver something. But I can at least teach them Python's optional type hints and mypy.

[nradov]

Java also has a huge number of libraries, plus static type checking.

[fiedzia]

It has many. But I know several companies that move from Java to Python because that's what developers, data engineers and ML/AI experts use.