I think if you've been bitten by compilation times in e.g. Scala or C++, then compile speed is something you end up caring about. When it comes to modern static

I think if you've been bitten by compilation times in e.g. Scala or C++, then compile speed is something you end up caring about. When it comes to modern static languages, it seem like there's a tradeoff where providing all the abstractions and ergonomics to make you not miss any functionality from dynamic languages will instead expand compilation times and make you miss the instant feedback of an interpreted language. Or give up on that and make the language much simpler and more limited, and you get fast compilation (e.g. Go). So I think people are looking for the holy grail of a language with both ease of use, extensive ergonomics and abstractions, while maintaining fast compilation times. So anytime a candidate comes along they ask about the parts of that equation that are not in the bullet list.