Yup. We have gotten into the habit of leaving a lot of potential performance on the floor in the interest of productivity/accessibility. What always amazes me is when I have to work with a person who only speaks Python or only speaks JS and is completely unaware of the actual performance potential of a system. I think a lot of people just accept the performance they get as normal even if they are doing things that take 1000x (or worse) the time and/or space than it could (even without heroic work).

Agreed that switching to lower level languages give the potential of many orders of magnitude. But the thing that was most enlightening was that removing pandas made a 9900% increase in speed without even a change to language. 20 minutes down to 12 seconds is a very big deal, and I still don't have to remember how to manage pointers.

I don’t believe orders of magnitude is achievable in general. Even python, which is perhaps the slowest mainstream language clocks in at around 10x that of C.

Sure, there will be some specialized program where keeping the cache manually small you can achieve big improvements, but most mainstream managed languages have very great performance. The slowdown is caused by the frameworks and whatnot, not the language itself.