[Mailman-Developers] python is slow

[Bernhard Kuemel]

Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-12-18 at 14:52, Bernhard Kuemel wrote:
> 
>>You name the reasons why I will not produce the 'convincing 
>>evidence' Richard Barret is interested in. I do however believe 
>>ESR is called authority rightly and assume he is has sufficient 
>>knowledge of and communication with experts in the languages he 
>>writes about so his opinion adds to my experience that python is 
>>slow. Some complex things are hard to prove so I thought you 
>>might be interested in the opinion of a neural network trained in 
>>the subject.
> 
> Saying "Python is slow" is pretty much a value-less statement.

Ohh, I think it makes a good subject header as it describes well 
what this thread is about.

 > Slower than what?  Slow when doing what?  Too slow?  Which 
version of Python?

It seems you lost track of the thread. Ok ... I said, I did't 
like python, because it burnt up so much CPU time on our old P60 
server. Mailman was started via cron once a minute and took about 
15 s CPU time each time. 25% average CPU usage just to find out 
that there is nothing to do appears much to me. There was also a 
flat mate who used python and i noticed the processor load of 
that, too.

Someone on mailman-developers at python.org then was interested in 
"convincing evidence" that python is slower than perl. But as we 
agree that such evidence is difficult to produce and does not 
mean much I cited Eric Stephen Raymond's book "The art of unix 
programming" where he says ...

"In fact it's generally thought to be the least efficient and 
slowest of the major scripting languages, a price it pays for 
runtime type polymorphism." I originally quoted the whole 
paragraph to be fair.

> Besides that, this thread is more appropriate on python-list at python.org
> or some other advocacy list.

Ok, I post this message there.

> I firmly believe Python is both fast enough and the right
 > choice for Mailman, and that's not going to change.

Allright. I trust you know what you are saying.

> -Barry

Bernhard

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