I, too, went through a &ldquo;C&rdquo; phase and have ended up using Python. I looked at Perl and said &ldquo;yuck!&rdquo; And I looked at Genie and concluded that the lack of libraries and documentation ruled it out. I think I know the answer to your &ldquo;heretical&rdquo; question, &ldquo;why are we not all using a language that is as efficient to run as C and as efficient to write as Python?&rdquo;: It is a lot harder than it looks. Python (specifically CPython) looks terrible in benchmarks, but for many real applications it is slower than C, but not enough slower to matter. Also, lots of smart people have tackled the problem from lots of different directions (C++, OCaml, Java, Unladen Sparrow, etc.) with limited success so far. And change is slow just because being an early adopter of a language is expensive, and being a late abandoner is even more expensive. But take a look at the PyPy project and the &ldquo;RPython&rdquo; language.