[Krssst]

Performance is worthless if the code isn't correct. It's easier to write correct code reasonably quickly in Python in simple cases (integers don't overflow like in C, don't wrap around like in C#, no absurd implicit conversions like in other scripting languages).

Also you don't need code to be fast a lot of the time. If you just need some number crunching that is occasionally run by a human, taking a whole second is fine. Pretty good replacement for shell scripting too.

[pavon]

But many of the language decisions that make Python so slow don't make code easier to write correctly. Like monkey patching; it is very powerful and can be useful, but it can also create huge maintainability issues, and its existence as a feature hinders making the code faster.

[Spivak]

I mean you can see it with your own experience, folks will post a 50 line snippet of ordinary C code in an blog post which looks like you're reading a long dead ancient language littered with macros and then be like "this is a lot to grok here's the equivalent code in Python / Ruby" and it's 3 lines and completely obvious.

Folks on HN are so weird when it comes to why these languages exist and why people keep writing in them. For all their faults and dynamism and GC and lack of static typing in the real world with real devs you get code that is more correct written faster when you use a higher level language. It's Go's raison d'etre.