I am not writing a web app, I'm writing an embedded system. Catching an exception is nice, but I still need my code to keep working, which memory leaks do allow, generally for a long time. yes we have had some 'memory scribbler' bugs that were a pain to track down, but they are very rare compared to changing python code and missing to make the right change to an error handling path and now Python unwinds to main instead of handling the error correctly. Note that I'm saying Python errors of that nature are more common despite comparing 50k Lines of Python to 15m lines of C++.

For short programs Python works great, but it doesn't scale to large programs.