[omnigoat]

Well you've clearly never had to worry about memory paging and the cost of indirection, like I have (actually from memory I think you must have at some point?). The difference is real and significant. Try writing a particle system using a linked-list over a vector, the speed difference will be crippling. I really feel that most of the hatred for C++ stems from people not understanding why such complexity exists in the language.

[nostrademons]

The point is that you don't have to worry about the difference in Python, because you don't use Python for the parts where performance matters. If you've got a million instances in your collection, you probably want to write your data structure and key traversal functions in C. Python has a sequence protocol, so you can easily wrap it to operate on it just like a native list (which is really a vector), but the operations that need to be fast should be in heavily-optimized C.

In every system I've written, there's been a large chunk of code that runs on startup, or implements a feature that only 1% of users care about, or performs setup for one of these expensive operations but itself only touches a few data items. This usually consumes about 90% of the code but only about 1% of the runtime. Heck, probably 50% of my code never makes it to production at all, because it's exploratory or analysis code that's intended to define the problem, not implement the solution. Why not write it in a language that makes you really productive, and spend the time saved to optimize the hell out of the remaining 10%?

[tptacek]

The performance difference between a vector and a list has nothing at all to do with what we're talking about. Stop picking random things in the discussion to nerd out about. We get it, you're awesome. The point is that in Python the distinction isn't made.