It was not meant as an appeal to authority. It was meant as a reference to the experience of a larger software company who writes code in both languages. That

It was not meant as an appeal to authority. It was meant as a reference to the experience of a larger software company who writes code in both languages. That said I'll agree they have a bias, everyone has. Full disclosure: I like C++. I also do like Python but it is my preferred language for specific scenarios. I also agree to some extent that languages themselves aren't fast or slow (though to some extent they are). In theory equivalent code in two languages should result in machine code that is just as efficient and it is sometimes a fluke or some implementation choices that make it not so. I can talk a little bit to the security question. One thing we need to consider is that we're dealing with systems, not strictly with bits written in some language. Various injection attacks are almost universally carried in platforms that are not C/C++ and their root cause is at the interface between systems (e.g. your web back end's interface to your SQL database). Even in systems that run in various isolated sandboxes there is always the possibility of penetrating that sandbox or to have other holes in the interfaces to the rest of the system. Honestly, the undefined behaviour bits in C/C++ isn't something that I've seen matter in practice. When all system code in the world is written in C you're bound to be able to point to some mistake causing security issues but we have no way of comparing that to anything (at least none that I can think of). There's always some way someone can screw things up. That said there's no harm in trying to do better- if we can get safer languages, where it's harder to make mistakes, and have all the benefits of the less safe language it's a win-win. No downside.