It’s not like that cannot be changed. Look at PHP, which managed to evolve brilliantly over the last decade and gets tons of things right now.

I keep on hearing people be excited about PHP. Having first attempted to use PHP in early 00s, I simply cannot bring myself to attempt it again. I once had to rewrite large chunks of a site because it simply couldn't deal with the fact that a string had an apostrophe in it.

PHP has evolved a lot, but it also still has a lot of cruft from its earlier days. And it has made breaking changes on a scale python probably couldn't get away with.