Well, there's also type hints that so far we haven't added to "What's New" :)
The problem Python faces is that Python's Little Tin God painted the language into a corner. He insisted for years that everything in Python had to be fully dynamic. This limited performance.
Then came competition in Python's space. Go came along, Javascript got traction on the server, and Python faced a real threat. Both of those can beat Python on performance, sometimes by huge margins, and they're useable by Python-type programmers used to the freedoms of scripting languages.
The Python 3 debacle had already thrown the Python community into disarray - most of the production work is still on Python 2, which was supposed to be abandoned but refused to die because the cost of conversion was much higher than expected. Meanwhile, Python 3 takeup was far less than expected; numbers like 10-20% come from downloads, and production use is probably less. Another incompatible change in the syntax would be rejected by the market. An incompatible change to a "typed Python" wouldn't fly.
So we get PEP 484, which is ugly but might help Python survive. Might.
In any case, JavaScript is dynamically/unityped, so its performance is unlikely to provide a reason for type annotations. The real problem here is that PyPy is still maturing, and can't be used by many people because of legacy C extensions.
This seems really hyperbolic. I'm not sure Go really competes in the same space as Python; also Python is so well entrenched as the successor to Fortran in the scientific computing space, that this would seem to guarantee continued relevance far into the future. It's probably like a lot of things, it may not be as sexy or break neck fast (though PyPy is staged to change that, and maybe we can also feasible get a non-sucky version of IronPython or Jython), but it's pretty much everywhere now, kind of like Perl, C, PHP, Java....
Uhhh... no. FORTRAN is literally the fastest programming language in existence. Maybe Python is good for prototyping or pre/post-processing some data, but with a performance hit in the 100x order of magnitude, you won't run Python scripts for the bulk of any serious scientific computing project.
[1] http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-dev/f2py/getting-started.htm... [2] http://pymca.sourceforge.net/
Also: http://www.quora.com/How-did-Python-dominate-scientific-comp... http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/138643/why-is...
Finally as a Physics person, you might also like the coursework for this (I certainly enjoyed the course): http://pages.physics.cornell.edu/~myers/teaching/Computation...
I don't need raw speed. I need development speed so I can easily iron out bugs and try new methods. My colleagues develop in R for the same reason.
Stopped reading after this.
My housemate is a Math/Stats person he works in finance and uses R for much the same reasons.
Maybe Python is useful but it would have to offer me something compelling to make me switch over.
Your criticism of Python being dynamically typed is also misguided. There are many benefits of having a dynamically typed language, which I won't bother to enumerate here since this subject gets beaten to death regularly on HN. It is a good choice to make this design decision up front and honor it as the language grows. Guido is not a moron; he knew there would be performance implications. Nobody today chooses Python for it's native performance anyways (although Cython and PyPi have made great strides for common cases).
The value of Python is not in performance, it's in the language simplicity, large ecosystem, and highly developed libraries. There are some disciplines such as machine learning and quantitative finance which are all but predicated upon Python, with excellent results. Comparisons to Go and JS are incongruous; those languages have other benefits which would make them good choices if things like concurrency (Go) and very high level abstractions (JS) are important.
The Python 3 transition was indeed rough, but in no way is it a "debacle". The community is not in "disarray"; that's absurd. The transition to 3 will happen eventually, and indeed this lethargy was caused by deliberate breakage in language features. Maybe not the best decision in hindsight, but far from this cataclysmic fantasy you seem to be depicting.