Is it gauche to offer my own counterpoint? Another possibility is that the requirement to "drop to C" is a virtue by de-democratizing access to serious perform

Is it gauche to offer my own counterpoint? Another possibility is that the requirement to "drop to C" is a virtue by de-democratizing access to serious performance. In other words, let the commoners eat Python, while the anointed manage their own memory. I personally find this argument a bit distasteful / disagree with it, but there was a thread the other day that talked about the, uh, variable quality of code in the Julia ecosystem (Julia being another language where dropping to C isn't important for performance). In Julia, the academics can just write their code and get on with their work—the horror!