Some of the best drivers started out in go-karts, something about the feel of the road and getting the most out of such a limited vehicle.

I would not call python a go-kart I would call python a mini-van. Boring and looked down upon, but is the best vehicle around for doing your daily activities in.

Throwing money/time/effort at it sometimes changes things. Javascript and PHP do pretty well on some specific workloads now for example.