alt Hacker NewsSmall languages, if they are suitably constrained, offer far more reasoning power and optimisation potential. This is why we need more small languages, not less. Python aims for maximum flexibility and maximum ease of use. This comes with real and serious trade offs. Python programs are very very difficult to reason about, for both people and machines.
A textbook example for you are (proper) regular expressions. This little language guarantees O(n) matching. The Python and Perl communities added backtracking without truly understanding why backtracking was missing in the first place. Now their misnamed "regular expressions" cause security issues for their users.
Even Thompson didn't use the linear time algorithm that's named after him in Ed and Grep. The Python and Perl implementations were inspired by Henry Spencer's regex, which was in turn reimplementing Thompson's backtracking implementations.