- What are the dynamic features of Python that you use in your code? (excluding ones that can can be done with a good static template system).
introspection & dynamic properties are a big one. Having functions and classes as higher-order objects that can be passed around like any other variable is quite handy. There may other "dynamic" features that I use but don't have mentally filed as "dynamic" so they've been omitted here. :)
- Are them worth the decrease in running speed?
heck yeah. I hardly notice any decrease in speed for using Python -- most of my bottlenecks are I/O (usually disk, network, or database) related and those that are computationally bound, it's often a matter of choosing a better algorithm (see several threads in the last couple months where the OP was using an O(N^2) algorithm that was fairly simply replaced with an O(N) algorithm).
For those using a best-case algorithm that are still CPU-bound, I haven't found great orders of magnitude speedup in converting them to a compiled/non-dynamic language. I might shave a couple seconds off runtime of a couple minutes, but the development speed using Python more than makes up for those couple minutes most times (most of them are one-off scripts that don't run more than a couple times), but my O(N^2) algorithms that can't be reduced to exact-matching-using-sets solutions still take correspondingly long no matter the language.
- Is it good for Python to become two languages in one, a fast statically typed one and a dynamically one, like pypy shows to like with RPython, or is it better to go the way of the Boo language, that (while being mostly static) is mixing dynamic and static typing in the same code, but that must rely on a very complex virtual machine to work?
I think Python walks this line very well, being readily embeddable in other programs, and allowing native code-modules to be included for inner-loop processes. While there are some times it would be handy to have some static features such as compile-time checking, I would only want to turn them on optionally, not have them enforced by the language.
My $0.02 taxed for bail-out money... -tkc -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
