The huge thing for python is it's ability to call out to lower level (faster) languages. From a machine learning point of view the ability to stuff data in to b

The huge thing for python is it's ability to call out to lower level (faster) languages. From a machine learning point of view the ability to stuff data in to buffers cheaply to be consumed by C/fortran is what's important (all of those fancy math and data science libraries do the heavy lifting in c/fortran). https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3118/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3118/ for more of how this was accomplished to get a bigger picture of the story.