[alxprc]

Thanks for clarifying. You're right that I was too broad, and it's certainly true that many physicists don't share my opinion (I'm working on that).

Speed is always a concern, but I don't think it dictates that C++ should be the primary ‘user-facing’ interface. Numpy is fast, but it doesn't sacrifice a nice API to achieve it.

Personally, a big difference is that a lot of the Python packages feel fast to use and, most importantly, to write. ROOT can be fast to execute, no question, but I feel like I'm fighting against it (and I'm sorry that's very vague and qualitative).

It would be very interesting to hear more about the genomics use-case, and how they evaluated the other options.

[whyever]

I'm using Python for analysis, and I'm running into performance issues constantly.