Yeah, this guy only had a superficial understanding of JS and Python--he had no idea how they worked under the hood, had no low level experience, no CS backgrou

Yeah, this guy only had a superficial understanding of JS and Python--he had no idea how they worked under the hood, had no low level experience, no CS background, etc. We already sunk so much effort into the Python implementation that he couldn't get behind a rewrite in another language, and moreover I suspect he was intimidated by a "lower level" language (relative to Python) and figured it would take weeks or months to be productive. In his defense, if you work in Python and JavaScript a lot, you get pretty jaded on tools and techniques that promise to be silver bullets and the idea that you could have a language that is orders of magnitude faster than Python, easy to learn, better package management and other tooling, and at least as maintainable just wasn't believable. Frankly, I think it would have been an easier sell if I lied and said that Go was only slightly better than Python.