I learned basic programming in BASIC in the 80s. Back then when you needed more speed, you grafted in assembly calls, and the speed difference was dramatic.

Straight Python feels as slow as BASIC - it's got nifty speedy library calls to stuff written in other languages, but if you need something that's not available in a library, now you're writing a library function for Python, in another language, and why not just write the whole thing in that other language and ditch the heavy toolchain?