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by wpietri 636 days ago
Yeah, this right here would kill it for me:

> Strings: Codon currently uses ASCII strings unlike Python's unicode strings.

That rules out almost anything web-ish for me.

The use case I could imagine is places where you have a bunch of python programmers who don't really want to learn another language but you have modest amounts of very speed-sensitive work.

E.g., you're a financial trading company who has hired a lot of PhDs with data science experience. In that context, I could imagine saying, "Ok, quants, all of your production code has to work in Codon". It's not like they're programming masters anyhow, and having it be pretty Python-ish will be good enough for them.
2 comments
Retr0id 636 days ago
>> Strings: Codon currently uses ASCII strings unlike Python's unicode strings.

Yikes. These days I wouldn't even call those strings, just bytes. I can live with static/strong typing (I prefer it, even), but not having support for actual strings is a huge blow.

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wpietri 636 days ago
Ah, looking further, I find this about the company: "Their focus lies in bridging the gap between these two aspects across various domains, with a particular emphasis on life sciences and bioinformatics."

That makes sense as a sales pitch. "Hey, company with a lot of money! Want your nerds to go faster and need less expensive hardware? Pay us for magic speed-ups!" So it's less a product for programmers than it is for executives.

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