All the points the author makes through the post are interesting, and Python is definitely great for protoyping, but I think the initial premise is false:
&quot;people don&#x27;t tend to think of [Python] as a high performance language; for that you would want a compiled language -- ideally C or C++ but Java would do.&quot;<p>Java is compiled to bytecode, but it isn&#x27;t a &quot;compiled language&quot; since that bytecode has to be interpreted by the JVM. 
All the good libraries the author mention are probably implemented in C or FORTRAN, and so a true implementation in C with the right compiler optimizations would for sure be faster than the python code.