I do wonder if C programmers ever asked that of Python devs back in the day.

Back in the day, Python devs commonly were C programmers.

Someone had to do the implementation, after all. And the C API was (and still is) kind of a big deal.

There's a reason the standard library is full of direct ports of C libraries with unsightly, highly un-Pythonic names and APIs. (Of course, it's also full of direct ports of Java libraries with unsightly, highly un-Pythonic architecture.)

This is still a thing today. There have been multiple times I oneshot some project that leadership had been waiting on some team forever to finish, and 90% of it was them refusing to touch a "noob" lang like Python or JS.

Any good engineer can become a good engineer in any language.

Still do