NASA uses Python.
Today's lesson in logic: "uses" does not imply "uses exclusively".
NASA pioneered cheap beowulf clusters (remember Extreme Linux?). They have shitloads of code in Fortran (it's a better performer for numerics than C). They have two of the world's top 100 supercomputers (one which is 4th). They have significant influence on things like PVM/MPI/OpenMP/grid computing (guess why?).
Of course they use Python too, but that's tangental to what
>>31 is muttering about. "2 billion instructions per second... [is] much more that anyone'll ever need" is somewhere in lala-land. There's no such thing as enough cycles for everyone, and there never will be.