[robotsteve2]

The world doesn't revolve around web development. It's not the only use case. Scientific Python is huge and benefits tremendously from the language being faster. If Python can be 1% faster, that's a significant force multiplier for scientific research and engineering analysis/design (in both academia and industry).

[mrtranscendence]

Because most of the really huge scientific Python libraries are written as wrappers over lower-level language code, I'd be curious to what extent speeding up Python by, say, 10% would speed up "normal" scientific Python code on average. 1%? 5%?

[animatedb]

If you are talking about large sets of numbers, then the speed up will be far below 1%.