[abdulhaq]

Yes and I've been using it for a lot of that time. Maybe you too. At the time tools like psyco were useful but never got enough traction to persuade core developers that it was a compelling direction. It never felt like an obviously wrong decision.

[pjmlp]

I only use it as Perl alternative for UNIX scripts, nothing else, unless forced otherwise.

There are enough alternatives with the same dynamism and native code generation.