Python and the need for speed

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Wed, 12 Apr 2017 03:39 am, Paul Rubin wrote:

> I still do my everyday stuff in Python and I'd like to get more
> conversant with stuff like numpy, but it feels like an old-fashioned
> language these days.

"Old fashioned"? With await/async just added to the language, and type
annotations? And comprehensions and iterators?

Admittedly type annotations are mostly of interest to large projects with
many developers and a huge code base. But the rest?

Comprehensions may have been around for a decade or two in Haskell, but most
older languages don't have them. I'm pretty sure Java doesn't. Does
Javascript? Comprehensions feel like a fancy new language feature to me.

The whole asynchronous programming features are extremely new and "hip".

What sort of things do you consider "new-fashioned" if Python is
old-fashioned?


I'm reminded of this quote from the timbot:

  In many ways, it's a dull language, borrowing solid old concepts
  from many other languages & styles:  boring syntax, unsurprising
  semantics, few  automatic coercions, etc etc.  But that's one of
  the things I like about it.                 -- Tim Peters, 16 Sep 1993




-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.