Is python very slow compared to C

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 12 Feb 2006 17:44:50 +0100, PA wrote:

> On Feb 12, 2006, at 16:11, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> 
>> availability of skilled programmers is absolutely critical for the use 
>> of a language.
> 
> By that measure, we should all be using Java, no?

I said nothing about whether Lua or Ocaml were good languages to take up
if you want to learn a programming language. In fact, it follows from
simple economics that individual developers should avoid languages that
are too popular. No matter how good you are as a Visual Basic programmer,
the price you can command will be pushed downwards by competition with
millions of other VB programmers.

I was talking about the other side of the equation. If you are hiring
developers to work for you, it is absolutely critical that there is no
shortage of skillful programmers in the language(s) you use. "No shortage"
doesn't mean "only use Java" -- there are disadvantages to Java that
outweigh the fact that there is no shortage of developers.


> "TIOBE Programming Community Index"
> http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm
> 
>> By comparison, even Forth gives 13 million plus hits, and who uses 
>> Forth?
> 
> Anyone writing in English:
> 
> http://www.answers.com/forth&r=67

Which might be relevant if I searched for "forth", but I didn't. I googled
on "forth programming". Yes, there will be some false positives, but I
never claimed that this was anything more than a rough and imprecise
estimate of the availability of resources for the languages.


>> Lua appears to be *too* lightweight, without even classes or 
>> inheritance,
> 
> Programming in Lua
> Object-Oriented Programming
> http://www.lua.org/pil/16.html

Did you actually bother to read the page you linked to? It describes how
you can emulate object-like behaviour for Lua tables. The following page
is even more explicit: "Lua does not have the concept of class".

That means that the object-oriented framework, which you get for free in
Python, has to be at least partially handled by the programmer in Lua.
Perhaps Lua makes it easy to do, but it is still something that doesn't
need to be done in Python because it is already there.


>> and a single data type where Python has dicts, sets, tuples and lists.
> 
> "Lua gives you the power; you build the mechanisms."
> -- Roberto Ierusalimschy, "Programming in Lua", December 2003
> http://www.lua.org/pil/12.1.2.html

Which is fine, but the more mechanisms you have to build, the longer it
will take you to actually get to the important work, which is putting it
all together to create your application.



-- 
Steven.