where are the program that are written in python?

[Lie Ryan]

On 05/22/10 04:47, Terry Reedy wrote:
> On 5/21/2010 6:21 AM, Deep_Feelings wrote:
>> python is not a new programming language ,it has been there for the
>> last .... 15+ years or so ? right ?
>>
>> however by having a look at this page
>> http://wiki.python.org/moin/Applications
>> i could not see many programs written in python (i will be interested
>> more in COMMERCIAL programs written in python ). and to be honest ,i
> 
> There are two kinds of 'commercial' programs.
> 1. The vast majority are proprietary programs kept within a company for
> its own use. As long as these work as intended, they are mostly
> invisible to the outside world.
> 2. Programs sold to anyone who wants them.
> 
> Python trades programmer speed for execution speed. If a successful
> Python program is going to be run millions of times, it makes economic
> sense to convert time-hogging parts to (for instance) C.  In fact, this
> is a consideration in deciding what functions should be builtin and
> which stdlib modules are written or rewritten in C.
> 
> Programs being sold tend to be compared to competitors on speed with
> perhaps more weight than they rationally should. Speed is easier to
> measure than, for instance, lack of bugs.

doubting python's speed? Look at Mercurial vs. SVN; Mercurial is written
in Python while SVN in C. Mercurial beats SVN in speed by several orders
of magnitude.

One of Mercurial's design goal was to be faster than SVN, if the
programmers have naively believed that choice of language would matter
to program's speed, they'd choose to write Mercurial in assembly instead
(the same argument applies to Git, written in shell scripts).

Now, you may think this is an unfair comparison, since Mercurial is hype
and new, SVN is antiquated and old. But it shows that in real-life, the
language being inherently slow often dosn't matter. What matters more
are the choice of data structure and algorithm, I/O speed, network
latency, and development speed.