Exactly. Being able to do fast things using typical procedural idioms, and being able to implement new, fast routines without dropping to a different, lower-le

Exactly. Being able to do fast things using typical procedural idioms, and being able to implement new, fast routines without dropping to a different, lower-level language are huge wins. Python is a nice language syntactically, it's just too bad that fundamental design decisions made it intrinsically slow.