It is also unfortunate that several of the language developers and related dev communities have come out against compilers (python and jython in particular). This is the (religious) downside to open source fundamentalism.
PyPy is a counterexample: it's a JIT compiler for Python, pretty efficient.
Compiling dynamic languages is not easy: their semantics of having everything dynamic and changeable at runtime resists it. Python is internally compiled into a pretty compact bytecode, but something like a method call is much more involved business in Python than even in C++, and is many times slower.
WRT fundamentalism: most sane open source communities are pretty pragmatic; Python's in particular.
Compiling dynamic languages is not easy: their semantics of having everything dynamic and changeable at runtime resists it. Python is internally compiled into a pretty compact bytecode, but something like a method call is much more involved business in Python than even in C++, and is many times slower.
WRT fundamentalism: most sane open source communities are pretty pragmatic; Python's in particular.