> somebody decided that with Python 3.13 there would be no more precompiled wheels of numpy < 2

Wow. NumPy 2.0 was released less than a year ago and they're already starting to drop support for 1.x?! It only supports Python versions up to 3.12, all of which are themselves either unsupported or in "security fixes only" mode.

The developers plan to end-of-life 1.x entirely in less than six months time. Do they not know their target audience at all?

> it's much harder to get promoted and get acknowledgement for judicious tending of a language than it is to ship a bunch of new features

Yes - as Mark Lutz (author of "Learning Python") puts it [0]: "[Python's] evolution is largely driven by narcissism, not user feedback" and "Python remains a constantly morphing sandbox of ideas, which is great if you just want to play in the sandbox, but lousy if you're trying to engineer reliable and durable software".

[0] https://learning-python.com/python-changes-2014-plus.html#se...