The thing that distinguishes an engineer from a bodger is not just observing what works but understanding why, how, and to what margin of safety it works.

The reason the "realtime" designation exists at all is that, in a realtime system, it is possible to say what the worst-case timing is for any operation, and to guarantee by design what failure conditions can and cannot happen.

You cannot guarantee in a python program the timing of your GC. You can't even guarantee that the whole thing won't fall over with an exception.

And we've already had this problem with the Toyota "unintended acceleration" bug, in the (far simpler) electronic throttle system: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_... - and that was using C, but not in an appropriate style (MISRA or similar).

(89 dead, cost Toyota billions)