[bionsuba]

This is a nice sentiment, but this rarely plays out in practice in my experience.

People use Python all the time to manipulate data sets >= 100G in size despite its speed failings at that size. Why? Because Pandas is just so damn convenient. It would take me a grand total of 30 seconds to write Pandas code which read a TSV and gave me the sum of two multiplied together columns grouped by the day of a timestamp column. Doing that in C would take several orders of magnitude more time.

It's an optimization of people's time problem. You could probably spend several hours (or days) writing a C program for a specific problem. But if you can spend only 40% of the time writing the program and have it only 20% slower, then that's a definite win (these numbers are just an example).