This is the most illustrative analogy. I suppose the answer is a little bit of both. Python numeric performance is a really interesting case. Those folks would

This is the most illustrative analogy. I suppose the answer is a little bit of both. Python numeric performance is a really interesting case. Those folks would certainly drop down to C. But my casual observation is that they would build the bridge when they came back above water. A lot of work went into this because Python performance has historically been quite bad for a Data Science/ML language. Part of this is the size of the community. But what is we also consider the Common Lisp community? Common Lisp is incredibly performant. A lot of work went into the underlying C libraries. Perhaps most of that was when the community was more vibrant. But still, a casual observation is that CL folk live in CL.