Mark Shannon writes:
On 13/05/2021 5:32 am, Terry Reedy wrote:
The claim that starts the Motivation section, "Python is widely acknowledged as slow.", has multiple problems.
How would you rephrase it, bearing in mind that needs to be short?
We can make CPython run significantly faster, at a reasonable cost in developer time, without otherwise changing the sematics of the language. If you have good justification for saying "as fast as the best JS/Lua implementations" or whatever, feel free to substitute that for "significantly faster". And now this:
It is a legitimate concern that CPython is bad for the environment,
It is not. I do this for a living (5 hours in a research hackathon just this afternoon on a closely related topic[1]), and I assure you that such "concern" is legitimate only as a matter of purely speculative metaphysics. We don't have the data to analyze the possibilities, and we don't even have the models if we did have the data. The implied model that gets you from your tautology to "concern" is just plain wrong -- work to be done is not independent of the cost of doing it[2], not to mention several other relevant variables, and cannot be made so in a useful model.
and hopefully make it less of a concern.
It is only a concern in the Tucker Carlson "just asking questions" mode of "concern". Really -- it's *that* bad.
We want people to be able to write code in Python and have it perform at the level they would get from a good Javascript or lua implementation.
So say that. Nothing to be ashamed of there! The work you propose to do is valuable for a lot of valid reasons, the most important of which is "because we can and there's no immediate downside".[3] Stick to those. Footnotes: [1] Yoshida, M., Turnbull, S.J. Voluntary provision of environmental offsets under monopolistic competition. Int Tax Public Finance (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10797-020-09630-5. Paywalled, available from the author, rather specialized, though. Two works-in-progress are much more closely related, but I have a paranoid coauthor so can't say more at this time. :-) [2] As Steven d'Aprano points out colorfully, using Parkinson's Law. [3] Look up Braess's Paradox for a classic and mathematically simple example of how reducing cost "with no immediate downside" can increase expense "once everything works itself out."