Crystal’s syntax is similar to Ruby’s, but AFAIK the similarity more-or-less ends there.

You’re right, of course: even Guido seems to have been moved off working on CPython and onto some tangentially-related AI technology.

However, Faster CPython was supposed be a 4-year project, delivering a 1.5x speedup each year. AFAIK they had the full 4 years at Microsoft, and only achieved what they originally planned to do in 1 year.

PyPy is a fantastic achievement and deserves far more support than it gets. Microsoft’s “Faster CPython” team tried to make Python 5x faster but only achieved ~1.5x in four years - meanwhile PyPy has been running at over 5x faster for decades.

On the other hand, I always got the impression that the main goal of PyPy is to be a research project (on meta-tracing, STM etc) rather than a replacement for CPython in production.

Maybe that, plus the core Python team’s indifference towards non-CPython implementations, is why it doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.

Fundamentally, CPUs use 0-based addresses. That's unavoidable.

We can't choose to switch to 1-based indexing - either we use 0-based everywhere, or a mixture of 0-based and 1-based. Given the prevalence of off-by-one errors, I think the most important thing is to be consistent.

The reason many languages prefer `length` to `count`, I think, is that the former is clearly a noun and the latter could be a verb. `length` feels like a simple property of a container whereas `count` could be an algorithm.

`countof` removes the verb possibility - but that means that a preference for `countof` over `lengthof` isn't necessarily a preference for `count` over `length`.