To be fair, Python without loading site packages is pretty damn fast. Definitely faster than most other things loading up. $ time python -S -c 'print "Hello

To be fair, Python without loading site packages is pretty damn fast. Definitely faster than most other things loading up. $ time python -S -c 'print "Hello World!"' ... real 0m0.007s user 0m0.004s sys 0m0.003s That's about the same speed it takes my system's cp command to show me an error page: $ time cp -fail ... real 0m0.005s user 0m0.003s sys 0m0.002s