> There is a reason why python become that popular and widely adapted and used, and it is not the extra layers of type checking, annotations and the likes.
Python got popular and widely adopted for the same reason PHP did: 1) it was readily available everywhere and 2) it's an easy language for beginners to pick up and get real applications working quickly.
But it turns out that the language features desirable for a quick prototype done by your fresh-out-of-college founding engineer aren't the same as the language features desirable for your team of 100 engineers trying to work together on the same codebase.
Python is at an odd intersection where it's used by everything from large teams building robust backend applications (particularly in the data/ML space), to data scientists hacking on scripts interactively in Jupyter, to ops people writing deployment scripts. You don't need type checking and annotations if you're writing a few one-off scripts, but you'd be crazy to not take advantage of them for a larger application.
Python got popular and widely adopted for the same reason PHP did: 1) it was readily available everywhere and 2) it's an easy language for beginners to pick up and get real applications working quickly.
But it turns out that the language features desirable for a quick prototype done by your fresh-out-of-college founding engineer aren't the same as the language features desirable for your team of 100 engineers trying to work together on the same codebase.
Python is at an odd intersection where it's used by everything from large teams building robust backend applications (particularly in the data/ML space), to data scientists hacking on scripts interactively in Jupyter, to ops people writing deployment scripts. You don't need type checking and annotations if you're writing a few one-off scripts, but you'd be crazy to not take advantage of them for a larger application.