[klodolph]

> If the performance of hash lookups matters, Python is the wrong language for you.

Announcement to Python programmers: “Don’t bother trying to improve the performance of your Python code! If performance matters, just completely rewrite your code in a different language!”

I don’t know how to respond to that, except to disagree with the underlying assumptions that (1) there is a “right language”, (2) if performance matters, Python is not a suitable language, or (3) people are generally in a position to choose which language a project is written in.

Even if performance matters, it is not the only thing that matters. When you choose a language, there are necessarily tradeoffs... everything from the skillset of your team, to the ecosystem of libraries available affects that decision. Finally, there are projects already written in Python.