If anything, to me it seems more important for a slower language to be optimized. Ideally everything would be perfectly optimized, but over-optimization is a thing: making optimizations that aren’t economical. Even though c is many times faster than python, for many projects it’s fast enough that it makes no practical difference to the user. They’re not going to bitch about a function taking 0.1 seconds to execute instead of 0.001, but they might start to care when that becomes 100 seconds vs 1. As the program becomes more time intensive to run, the python code is going to hit that threshold where the user starts to notice before c, so economically, the python would need to be optimized first.
If anything, to me it seems more important for a slower language to be optimized. Ideally everything would be perfectly optimized, but over-optimization is a thing: making optimizations that aren’t economical. Even though c is many times faster than python, for many projects it’s fast enough that it makes no practical difference to the user. They’re not going to bitch about a function taking 0.1 seconds to execute instead of 0.001, but they might start to care when that becomes 100 seconds vs 1. As the program becomes more time intensive to run, the python code is going to hit that threshold where the user starts to notice before c, so economically, the python would need to be optimized first.