> Or have I just misunderstood this completely and python actually is unusably slow for common things? I use python for some side-projects at work and for most

> Or have I just misunderstood this completely and python actually is unusably slow for common things? I use python for some side-projects at work and for most of my personal stuff and it's mostly fine, but its general slowness/big memory footprint implies that you can't just write stuff the "easy" way, you have to use the "fast" API or else it's terrible, and that's infuriating. It's as though the power of your machine is partially hidden from you and you have to go around that limitation. It also feels like it "should" be faster than it is, which compounds the frustration. OTOH many performance losses come from using the wrong algorithm, often implicitly (wrong SQL query, wrong caching policy, wrong data structure), and Python is generally fine in that respect, much more than many other high-level languages in fact: the pythonic way is usually also algorithmically efficient.