[miohtama]

It’s because Python object attributes can change any time, as they are accessed dynamically. Nothing can be inlined easily. The object structure is pointer heavy.

Here is some old 2014 post:

http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2014/05/09/why-python-is-slow/

As other commenters pointed out, some of these Python features, which are unused 99,99% time, could be sacrified for additional speedup by breaking backwards compatibility.

[pjmlp]

That common excuse doesn't fly in the face of Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme, SELF, Prolog, JavaScript, Lua.

It is more a matter of wanting to have a JIT in the box or not.

[register]

The same applies to Common Lisp. Maybe it's because type deduction is more difficult in Python than in CL?