Alexander Schmolck wrote: > As common lisp and scheme demonstrate you can have high level of dynamism (and > in a number of things both are more dynamic than python) and still get very > good performance (in some cases close to or better than C).
Just for personal enlightment, where do you think Lisp is more dynamic of Python? Can you new name a few features? > What's far more interesting to me, however, is that I think there a good > reasons to suspect python's slowness is more of a feature than a flaw: I'd not > be suprised if on the whole it greatly increases programmer productivity and > results in clearer and more uniform code. > > If you know the language to be dog slow any way, you're much less likely to > waste your time (and that of future maintainers) on the pointless > microoptimizations that geeks so love. Also, since only builtins have > reasonable performance there's added motiviation to become very familiar with > the available builtins (and standard libarary) and far less temptation to roll > one's own version of say dict.setdefault (even if it it sucks). The fact that > non-standard library code is inherently somewhat inferior (because it will > either be written in python and slow or written in C and a pain to install) > adds further incentive to attempt community wide standardization. > > I think it's not unreasonable to speculate that all this decreases production, > maintenance and reuse costs of python code considerably, so much in fact that > python's very slowness represents part of its competetive edge over languages > that are in some ways better engineered and more capable. I think you have a very good point here. +1000! Michele Simionato -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
