It would be nice if IRC didn't die and someone came up with ways to extend the protocol to support E2EE and other stuff.
I remember being a pretty happy and frequent IRC dweller back in maybe 2019, but it has only gone downhill since (when it came to activity, quality of discussion, the entire freenode drama, etc...) and because I haven't made that many particularly good friends, I didn't end up being invited into mid-sized private networks which to my knowledge still thrive and do surprisingly well considering that they are IRC. I can only imagine a similar fate has met XMPP.
OTOH, most quality internet places are slowly moving away from centralised services and slowly dig themselves underground. It's getting harder and harder to tell AIs apart from humans, some of my friends are particularly paranoid about their messages being used to train LLMs. Internet is slowly becoming an useless sea of spam again.
My main issue with python is the GIL, mess with venvs and other nonsense, bad performance. Python itself is not very embeddable, lacks a proper “type” system. It would be nice if we had some sort of an unintrusive typing system that would help to catch a lot of embarrassing mistakes we make while writing js/python/lua/other untyped languages; I feel like gradual typing from TS actually solves this problem pretty nicely!
A reasonably fast lisp/scheme built on top of a lua-like VM with a gengc & jit compiler + gradual typing of TS and a ground-up implementation of a rich standard library that doesn’t make the programmer reinvent hashtables, graphs or linked hashsets would also be nice. To me what makes a scripting lang good is reasonable (not C-level but still okayish) performance, a substantial amount of software you can graft code from to speed up development (see: python’s ecosystem), some sort of largely inference-based static verification with minimal amount of decorators and other crust to prevent certain classes of errors in the runtime, etc.
