I think he's saying Java is fast (compared with Python at least).

The point is, if you assign nearly mystical properties to writing in C, but when you rewrite a brute force approach Python program with a much fancier algorithm in C and you "only" get 10x speedup then something is amiss.

That's exactly what I meant, yes. And I used Java as comparison because of its speed being not that far from C itself - and certainly surpassing that of Python by a long shot. I definitely didn't intend to propagate the outdated "Java is slow" myth.