[Waterluvian]

Python was never really designed for speed. It was designed for simplicity and clarity of behaviour. The beauty of the age we live in is that we have such a broad array of tools to apply to different problems. Performance is often not the problem that needs solving, but when it is, you've got many options too!

[SwellJoe]

I'm not disparaging Python (or Ruby). Merely taking small pleasures where I find them. I work in Perl because of a huge array of existing code in Perl, not because I hate Python or Ruby (I've built stuff in Python and Ruby, too, and like them both).