Python _is_ slow, but even back in 2006 on a pentium 4 I had no problem using it with PyGame to build a smooth 60fps rtype style shooter for a coding challenge.

Python _is_ slow, but even back in 2006 on a pentium 4 I had no problem using it with PyGame to build a smooth 60fps rtype style shooter for a coding challenge. One just has to not do anything dumb in the render loop and it's plenty responsive. Of course, if you're going to interactively process a 50mb csv or something... But even then pandas is faster.