On the value of knowing the lower levels

While digging around some of the Python documentation (read: procrastinating), I stumbled across this section comparing Python performance to C in some very simple and contrived "benchmarks." The point of the section was that Python is not C, and you should be careful when trying to apply knowledge of C to Python. On a simple test of adding i to itself 10 million times, Python was about 50 times slower than C (which isn't really surprising, given that the C code just executes a series of single assembly addl instructions).