It’s not like that cannot be changed. Look at PHP, which managed to evolve brilliantly over the last decade and gets tons of things right now.

I keep on hearing people be excited about PHP. Having first attempted to use PHP in early 00s, I simply cannot bring myself to attempt it again. I once had to rewrite large chunks of a site because it simply couldn't deal with the fact that a string had an apostrophe in it.

I can only recommend to check out a popular project, maybe Laravel, and read it’s documentation. Alternatively, look at the PHP website itself. The new syntax improvements alone are pretty convincing IMHO, but the engine also got a JIT compiler, a runtime type system that’s fully opt-in, fibers for concurrency, and much more.

It’s really worth a second look.

PHP has evolved a lot, but it also still has a lot of cruft from its earlier days. And it has made breaking changes on a scale python probably couldn't get away with.

Show me a language that old without lots of cruft. The worst thing you can find is the standard library, which is just an unsolvable problem.

That's my point. PHP is still an old language with lots of "baggage", just like python is an old language with lots of "baggage".

Just like C# has baggage. Or R has. Or Go, to some extent. This is a non-sequitur.

I don't disagree with any of that. The context for my comment was (paraphrased):

GP: python has baggage because it is old

P: that can be changed. Look at PHP

Me: PHP still has baggage, despite its evolution. You can't really get rid of it without making major breaking changes.

Python 3(000) was an opportunity to fix all the things, so in a sense, the modern Python is less than 20 years old.

They didn't fix nearly enough, and then everyone complained about too much being fixed, and acted like twelve years wasn't enough time to adapt.