On the upside, it was 100 lines instead of several thousand.
On the downside, it was several hundred times slower.
I didn't bother trying to write serious simulation codes in Python after that.
My point is that some people assume that if they would just sit and write something in C++ without putting enough time and effort and skill in it, it would be somehow magically faster and better than high-level language, just because it's C++. They are mistaken.
Python standard library is extremely fast. For example 'list.sort()' in Pytohn could run 3 times faster than C++ 'sort(vector<string>)'.
Here are few examples when simple Python code runs faster than the same code in C++: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_threa...
Again comparing apples to oranges.