Why I love python.

[Anthony Baxter]

On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 01:11:54 +0000 (UTC), Nick Patavalis
<npat at efault.net> wrote:
> > Don't complicate it. Leave it as is. Work on making it faster, not
> > uglier.
> 
> Python needs drastic performance improvement if it is to scrap-off the
> "scripting language" stigma.

I'm biased, having done a paper on this at the most recent PyCon, but
I firmly believe that much of the "Python is too slow" arguments can be
answered with "too slow for what?" See the pycon proceedings, but I've
been doing VoIP in Python, complete with audio mixing, and it's been 
more than fast enough. 

Another large app is a database ETL tool - Python is more than 
adequate for flinging around a very large number of rows of data. 
Indeed, it could be 4-5 times as slow, and Oracle would still be the
bottleneck.

Sure, you're not going to get great performance for your numerical
computation in Python, but luckily, we have numarray for this. 

Yes, additional performance would be a nice-to-have, but I've not
really found the existing interpreter's performance to be that much
of a problem. I suspect that one of the many new implementations 
will provide us with some wins here.