If we’re going to leave Python as a scripting language (fine by me), can we get the machine learning community to swap to something better suited?

It strikes me as a bit of a waste of resources to keep stapling engineering effort into the Python ML/data ecosystem when it’s basically a crippled language capable of either: mindlessly driving C binaries, or scripting simple tasks.

What other performance, feature and technique advancements are we leaving on the table because the only “viable” ecosystem is built on a fundamentally crippled language?