I guess you aren't really experienced with the two languages then? For example, in the programming language shootout (http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/

I guess you aren't really experienced with the two languages then? For example, in the programming language shootout (http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/ http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/) the regex DNA test has a 5x lines of code difference between Python and C. That was code written by experts in each of the respective languages, and highly tuned for performance. About half the lines in the Python entry are just string constants that could easily be exported to a data file, which would give you almost exactly the 10x difference this slide represents. Now, that doesn't mean it is always so, but it's totally reasonable to see that happen routinely.