Rust isn’t super fast to code for novices though, hence the OP post, where their sibling wasn’t very productive in the language to the point where porting the entire project was apparently worth it.

…Maybe this is a bonkers suggestion, but I wonder if they could hack in GraalVM and the AOT-compilable subsets of Java, Python and I think Lua it supports? Now that would be ease of use.

I think there are others projects for AOT compiled subsets of popular scripting languages too.