Tom, thanks for sharing your opinion!

I agree that many people don't care about speed at all. As a former scientist I can attest to the fact that speed does matter for an important subsection of the Python community though. I'd been running huge numerical simulations using Python and, of course, all the packages to make things fast and sweet. Still my simulations took several days at a time to run through. Had I written the code in C, it would have been faster!