A large part of Python's popularity is due to the fact that there's a reasonably well defined 'pythonic' way to do things, that everyone can learn and then have a decent experience using and reading code produced by others.
You can implement fancy operators, overloading, entire DSLs in Python; but by doing so you break the pythonic contract and make your creation stand alone with a separate learning curve. There are some valid reasons to do this, especially for bespoke in-house tooling, but open source modules intended for mass use have virtually no justification to deviate from the primitives which the entire community is used to.
I think this is very much true, but actually I disagree with you when it comes to OSS. For example, Django makes heavy use of metaclasses in order to simplify its API, and I think that's fine, because no junior developer realistically needs to contribute to such a project. They can work on a project which uses Django without needing to understand the internals.
Having said that, I was only introduced to SQLAlchemy a couple of years ago, when already pretty competent at Python. Their filter syntax (ab)uses __eq__ to allow you to write expressions such as `MyModel.my_field == 'query'` which return an expression which can be evaluated dynamically when applied to a SQL query. I did a double take when first looking at this, assuming it at first to be a typo. I then ended up digging into the internals of SQLAlchemy to find out how it all fits together. The upshot was that I explored the SQLA API in great detail. The downside is I spent a few hours doing it :D
If all we do is write Pythonic code (especially now that "Pythonic" seems to include type hints), what's the benefit of the highly dynamic CPython virtual machine?
Surely a faster VM, or even an ahead-of-time compiler, would be possible if we give up on some dynamism? Is that a direction the community should take?
(I think Guido's answer would be no, based on his apparent dislike of existing "Python compiler" projects such as Nuitka.)
A large part of Python's popularity is due to the fact that there's a reasonably well defined 'pythonic' way to do things, that everyone can learn and then have a decent experience using and reading code produced by others.
You can implement fancy operators, overloading, entire DSLs in Python; but by doing so you break the pythonic contract and make your creation stand alone with a separate learning curve. There are some valid reasons to do this, especially for bespoke in-house tooling, but open source modules intended for mass use have virtually no justification to deviate from the primitives which the entire community is used to.