I am also a novice and not an authority on Python, but can offer three reasons for using Python even if it is not fast as other languages.
1. Raw language speed is an important factor to consider but for some projects language syntax, community, ecosystem and libraries are much more significant. Those are python strong aspects. Due to its simple syntax, Python is very popular at mooc platforms, such as Coursera, edX and Udacity. Really lots of very good educational content and I mean MIT level good.
2. Usually web projects do not need to scale that much. Website traffic distribution follows power law so if you do not expect your project to be in top 1%, Django will usually handle all standard CRUD workloads.
3. There are Python bindings for many C libraries, for example image manipulation with C speeds is available using ImageMagick bindings.
1. Raw language speed is an important factor to consider but for some projects language syntax, community, ecosystem and libraries are much more significant. Those are python strong aspects. Due to its simple syntax, Python is very popular at mooc platforms, such as Coursera, edX and Udacity. Really lots of very good educational content and I mean MIT level good.
2. Usually web projects do not need to scale that much. Website traffic distribution follows power law so if you do not expect your project to be in top 1%, Django will usually handle all standard CRUD workloads.
3. There are Python bindings for many C libraries, for example image manipulation with C speeds is available using ImageMagick bindings.