What is different with Python ?

[George Sakkis]

"Andrea Griffini" wrote:

> I think that if you don't understand memory,
> addresses and allocation and deallocation, or
> (roughly) how an hard disk works and what's
> the difference between hard disks and RAM then
> you're going to be a horrible programmer.
>
> There's no way you will remember what is O(n),
> what O(1) and what is O(log(n)) among containers
> unless you roughly understand how it works.

There's a crucial distinction between these two scenarios though: the
first one has to do with today's hardware and software limitations
while the second one expresses fundamental, independent of  technology,
algorithmic properties. In the not-too-far-future, the difference
between RAM and hard disks may be less important than today; hard disks
may be fast enough for most purposes, or the storage policy may be
mainly decided by the OS, the compiler, the runtime system or a library
instead of the programmer (similarly to memory management being
increasingly based on garbage collection). As programmers today don't
have to know or care much about register allocation, future programmers
may not have to care about whether something is stored in memory or in
disk. OTOH, an algorithm or problem with exponential complexity will
always be intractable for sufficiently large input, no matter how fast
processors become. The bottom line is that there is both fundamental
and contemporary knowledge, and although one needs to be good at both
at any given time, it's useful to distinguish between them.

George