Are the critiques in "All the things I hate about Python" valid?

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Feb 17, 2018 at 2:50 PM, Bill <BILL_NOSPAM at noway.net> wrote:
> boB Stepp wrote:
>>
>> This article is written by Nathan Murthy, a staff software engineer at
>> Tesla.  The article is found at:
>>
>> https://medium.com/@natemurthy/all-the-things-i-hate-about-python-5c5ff5fda95e
>>
>> Apparently he chose his article title as "click bait".  Apparently he
>> does not really hate Python (So he says.).  His leader paragraph is:
>>
>> "Python is viewed as a ubiquitous programming language; however, its
>> design limits its potential as a reliable and high performance systems
>> language.
>
>
> Python is simply not a high performance system language, but it has other
> virtues. You would not likely choose Python for a sophisticated distributed
> computing application, but not everyone needs to write a sophisticated
> distributed computing application.  I believe those that do, will be
> conscientious enough to choose an appropriate tool.
>

You'd be surprised how rarely that kind of performance even matters.
The author of that article cites C# as a superior language, but in the
rewrite from C# to Python (the same one I mentioned in the other
post), I sped the program up incredibly. Part of that is because C#
requires the startup of its framework (in my case that's Mono) just as
Python does, and partly it's because the simplicity of Python let me
eliminate a number of unnecessary HTTP requests. Trust me, your choice
of language doesn't help you if it means you do three (sequential)
HTTP requests when one would have done. Clean code has its own
advantages.

And if the number of HTTP transactions didn't change, the performance
of the two languages - or any other languages you choose - would be
virtually indistinguishable. Most programs spend most of their time
waiting, perhaps on the network, or the disk, or the user, but always
waiting.

ChrisA