Re: What is the core of the Python programming languag...
       
As a maintainer of the Skulpt Python-to-JS compiler (https://skulpt.org), I can reasonably attempt to answer this question.

Skulpt compiles Python to JS in one shot, so it's not a million miles away from the architecture Brett envisages. (I gave a lightning talk about it here: https://anvil.works/blog/pycon-talk).

Things I've observed:

- "Ordinary code" requires remarkably little fidelity. Python has a very strong "simplicity culture", so most code avoids being clever. If you're creating an environment for users to program against (as we do in Anvil), it's astonishing how little of Python you need to support.

- "Be able to use popular Python libraries" is really, really hard. The ordinary user doesn't use all the esoteric stuff Brett mentions, but libraries do, left and right. Even porting PyPy's `datetime` implementation to Skulpt required filling out a lot of odd little corners of the object implementation.

We still have a pretty crummy…