[collyw]

With the exception of speed, why does Python need a replacement?

I am using Python daily, and pretty much all performance problems (with my work) can be solved at the database or caching level. I get the impression that Numpy can produce reasonable performance for numeric problems.

In my experience developer productivity is of far more importance to business than language performance (obviously that depends on your domain). I do get asked to speed things up. But I get asked for "something working" by yesterday far more often.

[lmm]

The blog post gives the rationale; it's a combination of performance, a hope that static typing would make it possible to avoid a class of errors 0install had been experiencing, and wanting to ship native binaries with no dependencies - a pretty specialized use case, but one that 0install happens to need. (I'm aware that things like freeze exist, but they're not really first-class citizens, and the startup time - very important for a command-line utility - is not great).

In general I agree with you, I was a big fan of Python until I discovered Scala. But it's not a great fit for the 0install use case, and as you'll see from subsequent posts, switching to OCaml turned out to increase reliability and performance without sacrificing concision or development productivity.

[mercurial]

> With the exception of speed, why does Python need a replacement?

Depends what you use it for. It's very good for a subcategory of problems, in particular prototypes or glue code. However, it leads to "use your test suite as a compiler" for large scale projects due its lack of static typing.

[Dewie]

> In my experience developer productivity is of far more importance to business than language performance

You seem to be assuming that Nimrod would necessarily be less productive to work with than Python?