It isn't nearly as much of a trade-off as people say. Languages like Haskell are both remarkably expressive and provide a lot of safety. (And, of course, languages like Python, Java and Go are the opposite.)
Almost by definition that implies that it makes some trade-offs that turn off lots of programmers. Still more popular than Lisp, though.
People learn JavaScript or TypeScript because they want to write web apps. Swift or Objective C to write iOS or Mac apps. SQL because there’s a database they need to get data out of. Python because there’s a machine learning library they need to use. Etc etc.
Language design is far down the list of priorities.
Clearly there's a trade off or else everyone would just use Haskell.
For one, there might be trade-offs against dimensions other than safety and expressiveness. Performance, corporate support, libraries, popularity, learning curves, similarity to other languages...
For two, popularity is simply not strong correlated to quality. Popularity is a social function driven by, well, social factors. It's heavily path-dependent and noisy. There is absolutely no guarantee, not even close, that the "best" thing in any sense will be the most popular, or popular at all.
People go where the money is, hence python. But python is widespread because there is employment in it. That adoption by employers follows a network effect, but it originally came about through the language design.
Early-adopter => mainstream => long tail
Adoption hinges on that jump from evangelists to the mass market, and that implies:
- attracts early adopters because of language design - early adopters can pitch the language to their bosses by showing cleat benefits, also because of language design
The most obvious exception is javascript, which was inflicted on the world by browsers. Even so, it had to be sufficiently shit for the php crowd to feel at home. (Unsure which came first, but you get my point.)
Php is exactly popular due to design. It was an exact fit for the myspace dotcom era, and there were no json APIs to illuminate its shonkiness. (I am still angry that [ ] serialises to either [ ] or { } depending on a fucking global variable. I cannot think, being maximally charitable, of any value that comes from conflating arrays and hashmaps. No, i do not want an array containing the keys 0 and "0". I can count on the fingers of one foot the times i have wanted that.)
Sorry - my therapist encourages me to rant about php. She said it's part of healing. I haven't even told her about back-end php yet.
Now, the thing that determines popularity is popularity. So Python still wins, even though its beginner friendliness isn't so important anymore.