Oh I don't think I'd go so far as to say building big C++ (or Rust, or Haskell, or ...) projects requires a ton of compute: it's just one way to tune the inner

Oh I don't think I'd go so far as to say building big C++ (or Rust, or Haskell, or ...) projects requires a ton of compute: it's just one way to tune the inner loop of your development process, the so-called "edit-compile-test" cycle. I've worked on projects that take hours to build from scratch and tens of minutes to do incremental builds on. When making a non-trivial modification and running the tests is 14 minutes, it's just human nature to end up with a 30-minute coffee-trip/HN-browse. When it's 30 minutes, you only get 16 of those in a standard work day. Getting anything meaningful done takes days or weeks when you only get to change your code 16 times a day. You can change Python code 16 times an hour if the changes are individually modest.