[cms07]

I don't think that's true with Perl at least, unless something has changed dramatically very recently.

[hrez]

If you use it to glue/pipe bunch of tools written in C it can easily be faster.

[paulddraper]

That's one recommend approach towards Python. E.g. numpy.

The other approach is pure Python and then using PyPy's JIT.

[lmedinas]

Which often is what you do in Bash with grep, cp, mv, find etc...