> Like what? None of the ones i know of meet the "expressive, flexible and easy to learn as python" test.

Kotlin is IMHO the best of the bunch, but Groovy might be the most similar to Python.

> I'm arguing that there are no languages which are faster, and don't give up some of the things that made python popular in the first place.

Python has some advantages for scripting - it's almost ubiquitous on Linux distros. But for application development, I don't think it's better than other platforms.