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

[r]

On Jan 14, 1:16 pm, Paul Rubin <http://phr...@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:
> "Russ P." <Russ.Paie... at gmail.com> writes:
[snip]
> I have a situation which I face almost every day, where I have some
> gigabytes of data that I want to slice and dice somehow and get some
> numbers out of.  I spend 15 minutes writing a one-off Python program
> and then several hours waiting for it to run.  If I used C instead,
> I'd spend several hours writing the one-off program and then 15
> minutes waiting for it to run, which is not exactly better.  
[snip]
> I would be ecstatic with a version of Python where I might have to
> spend 20 minutes instead of 15 minutes writing the program, but then
> it runs in half an hour instead of several hours and doesn't crash.  I
> think the Python community should be aiming towards this.

You and Everybody -- would be "ecstatic" if this could happen. But
first someone has to design such a complex implementation. You want
everything, but there is a trade-off.

You said you wrote this program in 15 min. How much testing did you
actually do on this data before running it? If you told me you spent
more than 15 minutes i would not believe you. Look, Python is not a
compiled language -- and for good reason -- so for now you need to do
more initial testing if you plan to run a "15 min hack script" on a
multi-GB data source file, and then throw a temper-tantrum when the
damn thing blows chunks!

If Python could give the benefits of compiled languages whilst being
interpreted(without taking the "fun" out of Python), that would be
wonderful, but can you implement such a system? Can anybody at this
point?

If you can, i can assure you will be worshiped as a God.