Yeah :/

That's what I had on my local machine, and I did not upgrade for this test. I have heard that things have gotten better in python 3.13. Regardless, I did include PyPy that shows it can at least be reasonably fast.

This is pretty much the problem Python has had for years is that people feel entitled to just type “python” and have it work. Linux distros choosing Python for scripting nearly killed the possibility of migrating to Python 3, had pandas not come along we could be talking about Python 3 the way we talk about Perl 6.

(Moral: never use the system Python unless you are writing super-simple scripts out of the standard library.)