Right, basically the GIL is a ceiling on what-you-can-do with python. Python has now passed Java in TIOBE, which means it has a HUGE number of people using it.

Right, basically the GIL is a ceiling on what-you-can-do with python. Python has now passed Java in TIOBE, which means it has a HUGE number of people using it. That represents a tremendous amount of collective investment and work in that ecosystem. C/C++ obviously provides nigh-unbounded access to the hardware for doing "serious stuff" like databases, high performance IO/big data/etc. Java has pretty-darn-good abilities to do "serious stuff" with its threading models and optimizing JVM. But Python is basically capped by the GIL. So while the amount of code written in Python (and Javascript I'd argue) is massive... does any of it substantively push forward the state of the art? Will layers of the OS improve? Will new databases or cache layers or large scale data processing be improved/advanced? We're basically at the end of Ghz scaling, it's all increasing wafer sizes and transistor counts ... lots of processors. LOTS of processors. If the #2 software language in TIOBE can't fundamentally properly use the hardware that the next decade will be running on outside of a core or two... that's a problem. All our devices have been sidestepping this at the consumer level with two or four cores for the last decade, while server counts have been expanding. Four cores can ignored at the application level because other cores can do OS maintenance tasks, UI rendering tasks, etc etc etc. But if your 2025 consumer device has 12-32 cores, and your software can only run on one of them... and it's the #2 programming language, and the reason is the GIL and it's baked so deeply and perniciously into your entire software ecosystem... Then to your point, why the hell will people use python? And then it will tumble to irrelevance.