The Cost of Dynamism (was Re: Pyhon 2.x or 3.x, which is faster?)

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 9:57 PM, Tim Golden <mail at timgolden.me.uk> wrote:
> On 23/03/2016 10:48, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 9:34 PM, BartC <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
>>> Someone could be interested in cars, mechanics and performance without
>>> wanting to know the most Pythonic way to get from Kings Cross to Heathrow.
>>
>> But if I complain that the trek across four blocks of London cost me
>> ninety minutes and my train ticket (which I then had to get replaced),
>> you would blame it on me getting lost, rather than accepting my
>> assertion that London's slow to get around. And if you said "hey, take
>> a bus or a taxi next time", and I next time walked and got lost again,
>> you would rightly call me a fool. And if I then had the audacity to
>> say that London's streets are badly designed, because I looked at them
>> and even without knowing what sort of traffic goes on them, I can tell
>> that those are slow roads... you'd have very little respect for my
>> statements about London. It wouldn't matter if I'm the world's
>> greatest expert on hiking from Adelaide to Perth; it wouldn't matter
>> how many nuances of Nullarbor sand I'm familiar with, nor how best to
>> find drinking water there. I clearly know nothing about London, and my
>> complaints about the city should be taken with a grain of salt, until
>> such time as I put in the effort to get to know YOUR city YOUR way.
>>
>> (Events depicted in this work are entirely fictional and have no basis
>> in reality. Really. Really truly. Anyway, I only got lost once.)
>
> Well if you tried to walk from King's Cross to Heathrow and only got
> lost once, I'm very impressed. I'm impressed if you did it at all!

I was walking something like four blocks, from one station to another
(we flew in to one of the airports and needed to take a train to
Manchester, and that involved trains on different lines). It was a
short trip and would have been an easy one, had I consulted a map
beforehand instead of thinking "Oh, it's just straight there and then
there and there, no problem!".

Obviously London's fault for being unintuitive. And for having railway
lines that don't meet at the same stations (well, maybe that's a legit
complaint, but the city has to worry about backward compatibility
too).

ChrisA