Does Python really follow its philosophy of "Readability counts"?

[Scott David Daniels]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> ....  I haven't anywhere in this thread as far as I know suggested
> eliminating dynamism from Python, which would be in "that's not Python
> any more" territory.  But, in the dozens of class definitions I write
> in any given day of coding, I might use the dynamism we're talking
> about in 1% of them at most.  If having to type a few extra keystrokes
> on that 1% improves program reliabiity AND performance, it certainly
> seems worth it to me.

But, the research on the language "Self" shows that even in the face
of a language with more dynamism than Smalltalk (or Python), performance
can be obtained using compiler technology.  It turns out you don't have
to type those type any extra keystrokes.  Compilers capable of doing
strong optimization already have to do enough analysis that they can
discover the static typing that is available in the code you write
naturally.   The way to get to such performance on Python is through
efforts like PyPy.

--Scott David Daniels
Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org