> When python became popular popular languages did not have such expressive type systems. Java and perl were popular then. I really like some of the languages

> When python became popular popular languages did not have such expressive type systems. Java and perl were popular then. I really like some of the languages you mention, but most of them were not popular, especially in Python domain at the time (scripts and web servers). The main contenders against Python then were Perl (timtowtdi vs Python one way) and Java. Java and C++ were strongly typed, but lacking most of the nice things of Haskell etc (at least Java). C++ is very expressive (prob more because of templates than the type system, but I will happily concede this one). For scripts and web backends, C++ and Haskel/ml were not popular. This leaves Java, perl, php and similar, and at the time neither had advanced type systems in the ergonomic way that it is now expected.