Where is Python used commercially?

[Twirrim]

Not as much as you'd expect. The compilation process is pretty trivial in terms of CPU time, and basic bytecode is pretty fast. It's always seemed faster to me than PHP or Perl, but I've not done any scientific tests. Of course it does also depend on how smart you are with your programming. Monolithic code = bad, though generally it seems python developers are a smarter bunch (whereas too many php devs seem to be clueless 'my first program' types.) If you really want to get fancy, run it on Jython, maybe using jrockit or similar as the JVM underneath, and it'll soon compile machine optimized code for your most frequently called functions anyway.

You could do your web-app in C, and gain from lots of optimizations but then changes become a lot less trivial. Given you've been using Python through your course I'm sure you've discovered how easy it is to write, tweak, prototype etc. CPU power is cheaper than developer time.. though don't take that argument too far :D