This talk by the creator of micropython [0] gives his reasoning for why to implement python on microcontrollers despite it being hundreds of times slower than C. Starts @ 3:00
- it has nice features like list comprehension, generators, and good exception handling
- it has a big, friendly, helpful community with lots of online learning resources
- it has a shallow but long learning curve. It's easy to get started as a beginner, but you never get bored of the language, there's always more advanced features to learn.
- it has native bitwise operations
- has good distinction between ints and floats, and floats are arbitrary precision, you're not restricted to doubles or even long longs. (I'll add that built in complex numbers is a plus)
- compiled language, so it can be optimized to improve performance
