How much do you leverage the REPL when you're developing? In my experience with "old Python" (I've yet to update my resume with new Python) I developed in an incremental manner making heavy use of the REPL, I never had the pains I do in static languages without a REPL story. Your comment to me reads like "Nowadays with modern tooling [that lets me develop Python like Java developers develop Java], it's terrific." My day job is Java with a powerful IDE that is crucial for my productivity, but this is because I'm trapped in the "write a comet mass of code interacting with a solar mass of other code and lean on the compiler and IDE tools in addition to my reason to tell me it has a chance of working" way of developing rather than sending small chunks of code to a REPL, testing immediately, and building things up. If I had to (or only knew how to) develop old Python in the Java way I'd probably go mad too. TDD can almost sometimes substitute for a REPL in JavaLand, but it has its own flaws... (And yes modern Java now has something like a REPL, my work environment unfortunately hasn't updated to support it. Soon.)

this. I find it hilarious that people keep comparing a python release from 2010 with something that was released in O(months). Modern python - mypy, attr/dataclasses has come a long way. Numba has also come a long way since it's initial release.