Hacker News Reader

I don't think that's true with Perl at least, unless something has changed dramatically very recently.

If you use it to glue/pipe bunch of tools written in C it can easily be faster.

That's one recommend approach towards Python. E.g. numpy.

The other approach is pure Python and then using PyPy's JIT.

Which often is what you do in Bash with grep, cp, mv, find etc...