Py 3.3, unicode / upper()

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Westley Martínez <anikom15 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Really, why should we be so obsessed with speed anyways?  Isn't
> improving the language and fixing bugs far more important?

Because speed is very important in certain areas. Python can be used
in many ways:

* Command-line calculator with awesome precision and variable handling
* Proglets, written once and run once, doing one simple job and then moving on
* Applications that do heaps of work and are run multiple times a day
* Internet services (eg web server), contacted many times a second
* Etcetera
* Etcetera
* And quite a few other ways too

For the first two, performance isn't very important. No matter how
slow the language, it's still going to respond "3" instantly when you
enter "1+2", and unless you're writing something hopelessly
inefficient or brute-force, the time spent writing a proglet usually
dwarfs its execution time.

But performance is very important for something like Mercurial, which
is invoked many times and always with the user waiting for it. You
want to get back to work, not sit there for X seconds while your
source control engine fires up and does something. And with a web
server, language performance translates fairly directly into latency
AND potential requests per second on any given hardware.

To be sure, a lot of Python performance hits the level of "sufficient"
and doesn't need to go further, but it's still worth considering.

ChrisA