I hadn't considered the option of not making .pyc files, though I've complained about .pyo files in the past with distutils, but now compilation is optional there. The .pyc and .pyo files certainly clutter a directory. If there is no significant performance improvement for loading and using .pyc files or the difference is only significant for large files or certain code constructs, maybe they shouldn't be automatically created. I guess this is another area for test cases.
Oh, in most cases .pyc/.pyo files *do* give significant speedup; the parser + bytecode compiler are really slow. It's just that Paul's machine is so fast and his program runs so long that he doesn't care. But many people do. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)