The bulk of this post by Brett Cannon is a detailed argument that Python makes sense to select even for projects with known performance concerns, but I got my money’s worth from the concept in the title and opener:

… it dawned on me that the problem is people are not treating language selection as potential form of premature optimization: if you select a programming language based on your preconceived notions of how a language performs, you will never know if the language that might be a better, more productive fit for your developers would have actually worked out.