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.
Few thoughts:
1. It's easy to embed Python in your D applications. I do this
for things like web scraping and when I want to write something
quick to read simple XML (I just convert to JSON).
2. Of course there is a Redis client. Elasticsearch is an
amazing product, but hardly requires much work to have a complete
API. I made a start on this, and if I use Elasticsearch more
then I'll have one done and will release it. I don't know the
finer aspects of Postgres to know what is involved.
3. That raises a broader point, which is that it depends on the
ultimate aim of your project and what it is about the right
tradeoff between different things. It will ultimately be much
more productive for me to do things in D for the reasons John
alludes to. A little work to get started is neither here nor
there in the major scheme of things. Adam Ruppe made the same
point - it's not all that much work to put a foundation that
suits you in place. You do it once (and maybe add things when
something like Elasticsearch comes out), and that's it, apart
from minor updates. The dollar expenditure on building these
things is not enormous given the stakes involved for me. But
that doesn't mean that you should get to the same answer, as it
depends.
4. I am not sure that all web development is just glue, or will
be going forward given what might be on the horizon, but time
will tell.
Laeeth.
