[petascale]

> iirc there were some studies showing that productivity is not significantly different across languages

If it's the same studies I'm thinking of, the result was that productivity was about the same in all languages _when measured in lines of code per day_.

So say 1k lines of assembler took the same time as 1k lines of Python. However, the higher level languages can _do_ more for the same number of lines.

[anfilt]

there things were its the reverse though. Like if you maniplating things at the byte level you have play with packing and unpacking the data unless its a binary format aready undertood by python. Like for instance common steing encoding like utf8. Also if your calling native functions from python that expects structs as arguments its a bit annoying.