Making multiple interpreters available to Python code

I used to work almost exclusively in PHP[1] and was delighted when I got to leave it behind in favour of python, having got so sick of its unnecessary sharp corners (obligatory reference to http://phpsadness.com/)

These days, though, I'm in the camp of wishing python were somewhat different than it is - notable wishes include of course a better story for parallelism, but also better options for type safety[2]. I'm completely over the concept of duck typing - I want to be able to know there are no type mistakes in my code at "compile" time, thanks.

For certain stuff, I'm starting to use Julia, and loving most of what I see so far, though it's not a silver bullet, sadly.

I've also recently embarked on yet another attempt at getting my head around functional programming languages. I'm constantly seeing things that other languages have tried to mimic without really getting all the benefits because they're so religiously paradigm agnostic.

I've been writing in a more and more declarative/functional style in various languages for quite some time, and the benefits are palpable, even if it's a bit of a learning curve for somebody whose previous experience has leaned heavily toward procedural & OO styles/languages.

[1] Well, obviously *also* JavaScript/html/SQL/XML/Uncle Tom Cobley...

[2] Runtime enforcement, better expressivity, checkers that don't need nasty workarounds... This is motivated not least by the horrible job IDEs can do of bog standard autocomplete with the meagre information available - even with highly verbose annotations. Also, some kind of linting to help measure/improve coverage & specificity of type annotations. Other languages just make complete type information a necessary part of the language, and *so much time* is saved by having the computer keep track of it all, that it feels like a no-nrainer to me.