Sure, I didn't claim it did. My point is that Python programmers don't tend to have a particular fondness for an interpreter. They tend to care only about the e

Sure, I didn't claim it did. My point is that Python programmers don't tend to have a particular fondness for an interpreter. They tend to care only about the ecosystem. If you came up with a cxpython interpreter that was faster than cpython and supported all the modules the same way (including C interop) Python programmers would jump over to it. If your cxpython was faster than cpython but didn't support everything they'd ignore it. Case in point: Python 2.7. While 3.x offered a lot of improvements it took years for some popular modules to support it. No one bothered to look twice at Python 3 until their dependencies supported it. Python programmers don't tend to care much about the interpreter so much as the code they wrote or use running correctly.