> If your only metric for a language is speed then nothing really beats hand crafted assembly Only if you know the micro-architecture of the processor you are

> If your only metric for a language is speed then nothing really beats hand crafted assembly Only if you know the micro-architecture of the processor you are running on at great depth and can schedule the instructions accordingly. Modern compilers and vms can do crazy stuff at this level. > Python is fast enough for a whole set of problems AND it is a pretty, easy to read and write language. It is definitely easy to read. But speed is debatable. It is slow enough for my workload to start wondering about moving to pypy.