[omribahumi]

How is bash faster than Python?

[arghwhat]

When what you need is a pipe, Python won't do anything positive to performance. Plus, CPython is horrendously slow in general.

Other than that, the simpler design also allowed greater parallelism.

[barrkel]

Bash lets you glue best-of-breed tools together, as long as they all talk on stdin / stdout / files. The tools themselves can be written in the best language for their task.