Upon reflection...

[Martijn Faassen]

Rod Weston <rod_weston at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I sympathize with your frustrations concerning my methods in my quest.
> And I agree that I may end up 'collecting' languages if I become
> frustrated with Ada, but I have made a serious effort to minimize the
> possibility.

[snip]
> It's here that I
> learned about the apparent slowness of Python - well, that and trying
> the Python Solitaire game.

Hm, I hadn't noticed any particular slowness with PySol. What's slow
in PySol? Perhaps the startup time?

It's of course true that Python code currently can't be optimized by 
compilers like C or C++ or Ada or Java can be. But there's a difference
between 'slower' and 'too slow'. That Python is slower than many languages on
many tasks can be shown with benchmarks (though I suspect the slowdown on
real world applications is actually not as high as some benchmarks would
indicate). That Python is *too slow* depends entirely on the task at hand,
and for very many applications it isn't too slow.
 
> I'm open to hearing more and I'm not going
> to stop reading the newsgroup just because I've made a decision. 
> Python is very, very popular -

Interesting; you got definitely a different impression about Python's 
popularity than people got even a couple of years ago.

[snip]
> I just wanted to
> provide my feedback to the excellent folk who have generously given of
> their time and expertise to my quest.

I sort of lamented there was so little of it; also perhaps on the
caveats we gave on your criteria; Ada will definitely suit your
criteria better than Python, but your criteria are open to questioning
themselves.

[snip]

> I'll give you all some feedback in another
> six months, after I have some solid experience under my belt - though
> it will not be qualified comparison with Python nor will I represent
> it as such.

I'm very curious about hearing about your experience. I wish you luck.
While I agree that playing with languages (or better yet, code some
real project in them) to learn more about them is one of the important
things you should do when selecting a language, giving matters some
careful thought can't hurt either! At least you're venturing in a
different direction than you're used to, so you'll definitely learn a lot.

Thanks and regards,

Martijn
-- 
History of the 20th Century: WW1, WW2, WW3?
No, WWW -- Could we be going in the right direction?