I think one thing that makes many Python programs "fast enough" is that people have already provided a huge pile of native objects in the form of the OS and its

I think one thing that makes many Python programs "fast enough" is that people have already provided a huge pile of native objects in the form of the OS and its trimmings. But this is true for other languages as well. If I were writing in C, I'd never try to rewrite any portion of the OS unless I had some otherwise insurmountable issue to overcome. Quite a lot of programs are almost entirely bopping along from one OS or numpy call to the next, with a tiny bit of business logic thrown in. You've got a better chance of making your users happy by thinking about that business logic at a high level, than trying to optimize code that's only doing 1% of the actual work. My use for compiled code is when there's no OS, and every nanosecond matters, e.g., working with microcontrollers.