You might be pleasantly surprised to learn that python by default caches the parsing results between runs. If it makes you feel better, you can think of it as

You might be pleasantly surprised to learn that python by default caches the parsing results between runs. If it makes you feel better, you can think of it as ~partially compiled :) But there is an inherent trade-off between having a lot of flexibility at runtime, and having aggressive code specialization and optimization at compile time. Well, I suppose you could combine those into one language, but you couldn't do both on the same piece of code...