&gt;Even then, in a lot of cases programmer time is infinitely more expensive than CPU time, so it often still makes sense if Python is the more accessible choice.<p>I think this is generally true outside of scientific computing, but often not the case here. Esp. if you consider the low salaries of scientists in the public service compared to private industry.<p>Even in the private sector I have routinely made things an order of mag. faster saving the need to massively scale out. People also forget about total cost of ownership, 10 servers costs much less than 10x what 100 servers require operate when you consider cooling, networking, power, part replacement etc.