"Slow" is in the eye of the beholder and depends on the job the needs to be done. Where I work, we write scripts in Python that control our measuring instruments, make them acquire data and compute results, the Python script reads the results, compares results to limits, and eventually produces a lovely report.
In some scripts, we make the instrument acquire and save data and our Python script launches another program on the instrument that will read in the data and perform specified analysis. That program can take a couple of minutes to complete. If we have to do this for multiple runs we launch them at the same time and they finish at the same time, the time of one run. So we are doing easy multiprocessing using Python.
Now let's consider, if our controlling Python script were instead written in a highly optimized blazingly fast compiled language, how much faster could this script be? It would still have to wait for the instrument to compute results; if running a separate analysis program it would still have to launch it (perhaps several of them) and wait for until they finished. I doubt the compiled script would finish even a second faster.
I think this kind of application is just perfect for Python. We considered other (commercially supported) languages before we went with Python. I'm very happy that we did. We can find people who want to program in Python and already know Python. I haven't yet seen an employee complaint about our scripts being written in Python, and I don't expect to.
-- Joseph S.
Teledyne Confidential; Commercially Sensitive Business Data
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