> For me there used to be a clear delineation between scripting languages and compiled languages. Python has always seemed to want to be both and I'm not too sure it can really. I can live with being mildly wrong about a concept.

Eh. There's a lot of space in the middle to "well actually" about, but Python really doesn't behave like a "compiled" language. The more important question is: what do you ship to people, and how easily can they use it? Lots of people in this thread are bigging up Go's answer of "you ship a thing which can run immediately with no dependencies". For users that solves so many problems.

Quite a few python usecases would benefit from being able to "compile" applications in the same sense. There are py-to-exe solutions but they're not popular or widely used.