On Wednesday, 14 October 2015 at 15:25:22 UTC, David DeWitt wrote:
On Wednesday, 14 October 2015 at 14:48:22 UTC, John Colvin
wrote:
On Wednesday, 14 October 2015 at 14:32:00 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
On Tuesday, 13 October 2015 at 23:26:14 UTC, Laeeth Isharc
wrote:
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Python-so-popular-despite-being-so-slow
Andrei suggested posting more widely.
I was just writing some R code yesterday after playing around
with D for a couple weeks. I accomplished more in an
afternoon of R coding than I think I had in like a month's
worth of playing around with D. The same is true for python.
As someone who uses both D and Python every day, I find that -
once you are proficient in both - initial productivity is
higher in Python and then D starts to overtake as a project
gets larger and/or has stricter requirements. I hope never to
have to write anything longer than a thousand lines in Python
ever again.
That's true until you need to connect to other systems. There
are countless clients built for other systems thats are used in
real world applications. With web development the Python code
really just becomes glue nowadays and api's. I understand D is
faster until you have to build the clients for systems to
connect. We have an application that uses Postgres,
ElasticSearch, Kafka, Redis, etc. This is plenty fast and the
productivity of Python is more than D as the clients for
Elasticsearch, Postgres and various other systems are
unavailable or incomplete. Sure D is faster but when you have
other real world systems to connect to and time constraints on
projects how can D be more productive or faster? Our python
code essentially becomes the API and usage of clients to other
systems which handle a majority of the hardcore processing.
Once D gets established with those clients and they are battle
tested then I will agree. To me productivity is more than the
language itself but also building real world applications in a
reasonable time-frame. D will get there but is nowhere near
where Python is.
Python is inherently quite good for glue and has great library
support, so if that's the majority of your work then Python is a
good choice. On the other hand, there's plenty of programming out
there that isn't like that.
