It seems the development of Cython is going very well, quite differently from the dead-looking Pyrex. Hopefully Cython will become more user-friendly too (Pyrex is far from being user-friendly for Windows users, it doesn't even contain a compiler, I think. The ShedSkin Windows installer contains an old but working MinGW, and this is positive). It seems Cython is going to become an efficient and general purpose language after all, with optional static typing (its purpose: mostly for speed), and it may even gain some kind of macros soon. So it may even end replacing Python itself in some situations where running efficiency is important, and where Psyco can't be used or isn't enough.
Apparently unrelated: few days ago I was translating a 200-lines long program from Python to D (D is mostly statically typed, like C++, Java) for personal use. That Python program was without unit tests, comments, docstrings, documentation, etc. So finding the types of all the variables required some time. So I have fed the whole program to ShedSkin, and in 20 seconds on my old PC it has produced a Python program with full type annotations (as comments on each line of code), that later I have translated quickly to D. In such "blind" situations (that are often enough in some scripts I find around) I think a statically typed program (without type inference) can be more readable than a Python program, because even if the programmer is super-lazy types must be present (otherwise the program doesn't compile), and with the variable names they give me some information that's absent (well, it's less easy to extract. ShedSkin is often able to extract it) from the Python code. The (little) point of this post: sometimes (when the programmer is quite lazy) statically typed code is more "readable" than Python code. Bye, bearophile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
