[graemep]

I do use Python and I am not that bothered about speed.

Very little of what I use it for has performance bottlenecks in the Python. Its the database or the network or IO or whatever.

On the few occasions when it does I can rewrite critical bits of code.

I definitely care more about backward compatibility than I do about performance.

It feels like Python development is being driven by the needs of one particular group (people who use ML heavily, possibly because they have deep pockets) and I wonder whether this, and a few other things will make it less attractive a language for me and others.

[winrid]

Your DB is probably faster than you think. I rewrote an API in Python to Java and it is around 6x faster with just same dumb N+1 queries, and the new API also includes all the frontend calculations that Python wasn't doing before.