why python is slower than java?

[Alex Martelli]

Hans Nowak <hans at zephyrfalcon.org> wrote:

> John Machin wrote:
> 
> > Or is this a joke/troll?? I can't believe the "unimelb.edu.au"; surely
> > a forgery.
> 
> Is it just me, or is the climate in c.l.py getting less friendly to 
> newbies?  In any case, 

Interestingly enough, I sort of share your perception -- and I have
noticed the same thing, and seen it remarked upon by others, in other,
completely unrelated newsgroups as well, such as it.comp.macintosh.

It's not, I think, about newbies in general: people who come and post
help requests, without giving the information that's quite obviously
indispensabile to let us help them, keep getting treated with
unreasonable amounts of friendliness and courtesy even after many
requests for more info go unheeded, for example.

However, newbies who are clueless enough to come blasting in with the
usual whines we've heard a zillion times -- Macs cost too much, Python
is too slow, there's no apps for Macs, Python must absolutely add
feature X or it will die, Apple's gonna go broke tomorrow, etc, etc --
do appear to get on our collective nerves worse than their essentially
indistinguishable precursors did last year, two years ago, &c.

The accusation of being a troll often follows, breaking the old advice
to "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by
incompetence".  Maybe it's a case of the corollary to that old advice,
"Sufficiently advanced cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice".
But why that should be so this year more than last year, say, is not
clear to me...


Alex