Typing system vs. Java

[brueckd at tbye.com]

> You didn't respond to my comments on potential for performance gains.  Can I
> assume that I scored a point?  ;-)

Sure! I agree that there's the potential for some gains, but the value of
that is so dependent on what you're doing so I stuck to things more
general.  I'm all for performance improvements, but performance (in the
CPU sense) isn't what draws me to Python and keeps me here. For me, most
programs aren't performance critical, and those that are usually aren't
CPU-bound (but disk, memory, network, etc.), and the CPU-bound ones
usually have a small performance-critical core that can easily be moved to
C.

Also, before optimizing any code you should be fairly sure that the
potential payoff is worth the trouble/risk, and that the thing you're
optimizing is one of the biggest bottlenecks (fry the biggest fish). I
don't know either is true here.

I'm sure there's many benefits to strict compile-time type checking (for
example, it makes the language more appealing to developers like yourself
who want that feature). My interest has been in finding the most valuable,
most compelling reason for adding it to Python, something that would make
me better understand the fuss. ;-)

-Dave