Thanks for all your comments, they've been really enlightening. As a data scientist who sometimes wishes for something better than Python I did have my eye on J

Thanks for all your comments, they've been really enlightening. As a data scientist who sometimes wishes for something better than Python I did have my eye on Julia, but I was unaware of what issues could arise putting Julia into production. Sadly, I think that kind of puts me at square one ... there doesn't seem to be anything, even niche, that can replace Python for our business use cases. We're a very Spark-heavy shop so I've tried to encourage Scala, but that got no traction, and it would raise its own set of problems. I like Rust but it's simply too complex to expect scientists and data scientists to wrap their heads around; it's hard enough to get them to use Python type hints. Oh well.