A little advice please? (Convert my boss to Python)

[Duncan Smith]

"Peter Hansen" <peter at engcorp.com> wrote in message
news:3CBB8ABB.57BAA189 at engcorp.com...
> Duncan Smith wrote:
> >
> > My boss is considering moving to Python (from Poplog), so I've coded up
> > something to read in records from a text file (as below) and return a
> > statistic based on the numbers of unique and paired records (as he
> > requested).  Easy enough (code below), but now he wants to compare it
for
> > speed against some existing code (Poplog?).
>
> As another "boss", I want to make the strong point that speed
> is not what Python is about (although you may well make this
> fast enough to suit him... it's not necessarily slow).
>
> Python provides exceptional benefits in the areas of development
> time, readability and therefore code maintenance, flexibility,
> reliability, and ease of learning.
>
> If he concludes that it's not "fast enough", I suspect he
> is focusing too much on a relatively unimportant issue
> and likely to miss out on a some major competitive advantages.
>
> Most of the time when someone concludes Python is not fast
> enough, they have a situation where something is expected
> to run once or twice a day, and it might take ten minutes
> with Python and one minute with C, and they conclude that
> is too slow...  meanwhile the C version is buggy, took
> four times longer to develop, and nobody likes to maintain
> it because the code is five times longer than the Python
> one would be.
>
> So make sure he takes a good hard look at just how much
> speed he really _needs_ (not wants), and at the places
> where Python really shines, before closing the door on
> your suggestion.
>
> (For what it's worth, we've more or less outlawed
> any internal tools not written in Python as being a
> waste of the developer's time, and NONE of our utilities
> are "too slow".  (No, we're not quite as anal about it
> as that sounds, but you get the point.))
>
> -Peter

I agree completely Peter.  Python is 'fast enough' for everything I've
attempted with it - even graph algorithms, MCMC etc.  But I've never had to
deal with large files before, and I didn't want to present him with
something that was unnecessarily slow (due to my code / and not Python). :-)

Duncan