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

[mk]

Paul Rubin wrote:

> 1) Parallelism.  Commodity desktop computers now have 8 effective cpu
> cores or maybe even 16 soon (Mac Pro, Intel Core i7) but Python still
> has the evil GIL that forces all threads to run on one core.  Java,
> Erlang, and Haskell (GHC) all beat Python in this area.  By the time
> Python 4 comes out, we will probably all be using PC's with 32 or more
> cores, so the current limitations will be intolerable.  Even today,
> since no one doing anything serious uses single core machines any
> more, the GIL is a huge pain in the neck which the multiprocessing
> module helps only slightly.  (While we are at it, lightweight threads
> like Erlang's or GHC's would be very useful.)

+100 for this one

> 2) Native-code compilation.  Per the Alioth shootouts, Python is much
> slower (even on single cores) than Java, Haskell, ML, or even Scheme.
> PyPy is addressing this but it will be a while before it replaces
> CPython.  

The lack of this already causes some pains at my company.

I was flabbergasted to read that optional static typing was dropped by 
Guido due to "lack of interest in community" IIRC.

Why!! Among other reasons, this could have provided for very easy 
performance optimizations of the small portions of the code! This could 
have been a huge gain acquired for little effort!

Regards,
mk