[Demiurge]

The missing piece of the discussion here seems to be socio-political (human) aspect of computer language usage. When choosing a "slow" language, many other factors beside performance and ecosystem are considered. The primary usage of a computer language is actually communicating with the fellow human beings, and there is a huge cost and overhead associated with all the software writing and interpretation. That is why it baffles me when Python is dismissed entirely on a pure performance basis.