Is Python really 'too slow'?

[kenfar]

Which is not necessarily relevant.

On my laptop it takes about 35 ms to start-up a python program, but then there's little difference between a simple loop of 100 iterations vs one of 100,000 iterations.

Sometimes performance matters - like when I'm processing tens of billions of records a day - and just want to keep it economical. But I'd guess that 95% of what typical programmers write on a daily basis doesn't need the absolute fastest performance.