I took an online class in college on Python and one of the assignments required the program to scan a plaintext wordlist for a word. I hesitantly made Python load in the entire wordlist and split it by newlines into values in a list, before something like "if word in wordlist". I fully expected my computer to grind to a halt because the interpreted language was loading in a four megabyte textfile, and I expected to have to make a much more complicated function to scan to see whether the word was in the list. I ran it and it ran in less than a second before printing whatever I put to signal that it worked. I didn't believe it so I ran it again with the same result.

Python is like BASIC if it was stable enough to be mission-critical and fast enough to work where it needs to. My previous experience with interpreted languages was with TI-BASIC and it blew my mind that my laptop was powerful enough to do something that fast. Sure, it's slow, but if you really need speed you're better off writing something in something like C or FORTRAN (or Rust now) anyway.

For basically everything we can feasibly ask python to do, it can do that thing faster than we could on our own; few are the things that we need done faster than that.