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by MatthewWilkes 1868 days ago
I'm confused by people that don't see the point in increasing the time efficiency of Python code, citing other languages being available. Python's strength has always been ease of development, with writing performant extensions being much more complex. Projects like numpy have brought much of that performance to easy reach of pure python programmers, but increasing the baseline performance is orthogonal to that.

There's a huge amount of pure python code out there, powering websites, acting as the glue between C functions and providing business logic to pre-optimised frameworks. These are not likely to be targets for rewriting in another language, but that doesn't mean that their maintainers wouldn't like them to be faster and cost less to run.
2 comments
hvocode 1868 days ago
100% agree as a maintainer of a substantial modeling and simulation project that uses Python. We use it simply because most of the people contributing ONLY know Python. If I was to rewrite large portions of the code in another language, it would be faster but a large portion of the team wouldn’t be able to effectively contribute any longer. We pay the performance price for that accessibility. I’ve already tried and discovered that moving to a new language (like Julia) will be a non-starter: the other people don’t have the time or desire to learn another language or tool chain (they’re not computing people: they’re domain experts in their non-computational fields). Any speed improvement that lets people continue working in Python would be a great benefit to that project.
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qsort 1868 days ago
Yeah, I'm really disappointed by the reaction here. I don't even really like Python, but its ecosystem is incredible and as a language to glue together stuff, expose simple APIs, general server-side tasks, etc. it's just fine.

Also, the Python's C extension story is much better than most other popular languages, so that's something to think about as well if you seriously need performance in your app.

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liberalbias998 1868 days ago
I don't like python either; it would still be good for the environment if running it generated less heat.
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