[eigenspace]

It's not an exaggeration to say that billions of dollars and untold man-hours from some of the smartest programmers alive have been spent on trying to make Python faster.

If it was as easy as in Lisp or Smalltalk, don't you think people would have succeeded by now?

Another example worth considering: Javascript is yet another langauge that is arguably more dynamic than Python, yet is rather easy to JIT. What's going on there?

It comes down to the fact that it's not really about the amount of dynamism in a language, but the kinds of dynamism that is really relevant for implementing a JIT compiler.

[pjmlp]

Politics also play a role.