The "History of Haskell" paper, a fascinating read in and of itself, is replete with admissions of lack of foresight. The reason Haskell has fared better than Python is probably only that it has a much bigger emphasis on trying new ideas in the reference implementation. The biggest problems with "Python" (GIL, FFI, standard library) are mostly issues with the reference implementation.
And where Python entered production usage in the late 90s and was building up a huge community and a base of code and continued building that base all the way to the present time, Haskell didn't really begin that until around the mid-200xs. It may be an older language in calendar terms, but in terms of libraries and tooling support it's basically 5 years old or so.
