OP, I would encourage you take some courses on High-performance computing and, specially, on Architecture Awareness in Programming. These types of courses will help you increasing the performance of your programs by being aware of what's running "under the hood" and ways to "help" the compiler/interpreter better optimisations.
Although it's accurate to say that Haskell or C++ are faster than Python, by having had a quick look on the examples you posted around here, I believe there's still a lot of room to improve (performance-wise) on your Python code that could bring a significant speedup boost.
However, bear in mind that you shouldn't expect Python to be close to a C++ performance unless you start using libraries such as NumPy that are, essentially, written in C/C++.
