Python is readable

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 2:14 AM, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
> While it's nice to know that we've got the ability to write extensions
> in C, not once have we ever felt the need.  I suppose if you're running
> a CPU-bound application, that might not be the case, but surprisingly
> few applications really are compute bound these days.

My boss and I have these discussions now and then. A topic of
performance comes up, and we debate whether or not, for instance, it's
worth doing a separate check of an input file to see if it's
properly-formed UTF-8 before parsing it (this is in PHP, or it'd be
easy - just do a UTF-8 decode and work with Unicode). The debate
ended, as they inevitably do, with "We're talking about a file that
someone's uploaded to us, so it won't matter". Whatever processing we
do is massively dwarfed by network time, and both scale linearly with
the size of the file.

ChrisA