>>19
Not only that, but that awesome hack the assembly guru used is useless the second the specifications change or he needs to do something else, which happens quite often in the real world (the one to make money from, at least).
Also, Python and C are very different too. I consider C a portable assembly. You still waste time mongling data types, allocating memory, and saying how everything should be done so explicitly. The language lacks introspection and it cannot do at run time what you do at code time. Python (/Ruby/Lisp/etc.) is a much higher-level, dynamic language. Its feature set is 10 to 100 times larger than C's, despite being simpler to use. A single line of Python, containing, for example, a generator expression which does something with a built-in list that's iterated with an extended slice and some dictionary wizardry, may very well equal thirty lines of C, and that's if you're smart enough to come up with a way to implement generators. In fact, I'll quote Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.