[Python-Dev] Re: 2.4 news reaches interesting places

[Guido van Rossum]

> fwiw, IDG's Computer Sweden,  "sweden's leading IT-newspaper" has a
> surprisingly big Python article in their most recent issue:
> 
>     PYTHON FEELS WELL
>     Better performance biggest news in 2.4
> 
> and briefly interviews swedish zope-developer Johan Carlsson and Python-
> Ware co-founder Håkan Karlsson.

Maybe we've done this to ourselves then. I'm sure the interviewer
didn't know what was the biggest news until after Johan and Håkan told
him. And this despite all the functional improvements that are much
more interesting for most Python programmers: generator expressions,
decorators, a ton of new modules...

Ah, but several of those modules are rewrites in C of modules that
were previously written in Python. Maybe we really *should* stop
emphasizing speed so much to ourselves, and focus more on fixing bugs
and adding features instead of looking for speedup opportunities.

I think Python's message ought to be more something like "programming
for the rest of us -- a child can learn Python, but Python's no toy."

BTW I strongly disagree that making easy .EXE binaries available will
address this issue; while not bundled, there are plenty of solutions
for maning .EXEs for those who need them, and this is not something
that typically worries managers. But the perception of Python as
"slow" does worry managers.

(Wish I could add more to this thread but my family is calling...)

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)