I disagree, I think it makes Python look really good. Being an interpreted, dynamic language where most internals are represented by a hash table, it'll never

I disagree, I think it makes Python look really good. Being an interpreted, dynamic language where most internals are represented by a hash table, it'll never compete in terms of raw speed. The people who choose Python choose it for the ecosystem and productivity, and from that perspective it's actually to its benefit that it's easy to replace your bottleneck code with a faster implementation. The only high level language in my experience easier to drop to C/C++(and now Rust) would be Lua of the luajit flavor.