That's a very naive statement. In machine learning, for example, there's a lot of scenarios where performance isn't critical but due to the huge quantities of d

That's a very naive statement. In machine learning, for example, there's a lot of scenarios where performance isn't critical but due to the huge quantities of data you may need to process (especially during feature engineering or selection), micro optimisations like this can result in huge improvements over millions of iterations. Not to mention Python has Cython and numba's JIT which can provide great performance when needed.