> [...], it is a uniquely horrible slow language.

To be fair, Python as implement today is horribly slow. You could leave the language the same but apply all the tricks and heroic efforts they used to make JavaScript fast. The language would be the same, but the implementations would be faster.

Of course, in practice the available implementations are very much part of the language and its ecosystems; especially for a language like Python which is so defined by its dominant implementation of CPython.

Fair! I guess I didn't mean language as such, but as used.

But a lot of the monkey-patching kind of things and dynamism of python also means a lot of those sorts of things have to be re-checked often for correctness, so it does take a ton of optimizations off the table. (Of course, those are rare corner cases, so compilers like pypy have been able to optimize for the "happy case" and have a slow fall-back path - but pypy had a ton of incompatibility issues and now seems to be dying).