I was frankly a little disappointed in both the referenced article and the one it references. C basically is assembler. If you have a problem that needs hardware-level access you'll need things like pointers. The really hard parts of C (like handling null pointers or lack of concurrency primitives) seem to be the flip side of this access. Whether you use things like braces just seems to be a matter of taste.
Sure, with Cython or a Python C extension. :)
I mean, you could, there's no real technical blocker, but it'd be horribly slow. Plus many failure modes of touching hardware are very likely to break the VM process and make debugging very challenging
The problems include:
- performance: implementations being interpreted, and relying on dynamic typing mean that Python is almost always slower than compiled languages.
- the run-time: Python assumes that things like allocations are always OK, and generally requires more operating system support than is available in low level environments.
By comparison, C's runtime is very simple and assumes very little, so it's good for writing code in a kernel or integrated system where many OS services won't be available to you. It's also much faster, of course, and it gives more direct access to memory.
You could write one in Lisp, which is in many ways a language like Python, but which does support bit twiddling & pointers if desired.