Python Popularity: Questions and Comments

[Ulf Magnusson]

I am shocked and exhilarated what large discussion this turned out to be.
I have been reading this news subject (started by Ron Stephens) all day long
(Well almost :-)
The future of a language (and especially Python) is truly an interesting
topic.

The submissions to this "news category" have truly been interesting.
It was said that "we" (the community) wanted more "real" Commercial usage,
Patrick (RPM1 <rpm1deletethis at frontiernet.net>) said: "The guy with the bag
of money needs to say, "Oh yeah, Python, I've heard of that.""
It was also said that python vs. other languages didn't lack any
functionality
well I agree, it don't since it's "Turing complete" like all other computer
languages,
instead, one could possibly talk about the "supporting libraries" and python
is darn good in that area.

However, Python do lack one important heuristic for the commercial industry
- RUNTIME SPEED -
(Well this is not always true)

I have a "little" proposal how to get gain more acceptance for the language
and to defeat the speed problem:
an OPTIMIZING NATIVE CODE COMPILER
should be developed... Pheeew.. now I said it...
(time to seek out the bomb shelter.. :-))

I guess I am a kind of a optimization junkie for mentioning this...
anyhow I am not saying we should compete with languages like C in speed
but a fairly optimizing compiler would be nice without compromising the
language capabilities.

Now the guy with the bag of money can say:
"I bought a optimizing Python compiler yesterday"...
and his associate would say:
"Good for you, now your company can both develop applications rapidly
which are free from bugs and even execute them safe and fast"

Before you all jump at me at once, let me make a obvious initial statements:

1. Since the language is currently evolving very rapidly it is probably
    a bad time to start such a project, the language may look completely
    different in a year and a lot of resources would have been wasted.
2. It may be difficult and dumb to develop a native code compiler because
    Pythons great introspection capabilities. I haven't really thought about
this
    issue for long, but it should at least be possible and cool...
3. Companies may have trouble to accept python before the language
evolvement
    curve is fairly slow, consider trying to "link" python modules from
1.5.2 and
    "python 3.0" ouch...

And now, what do you valued colleagues have to say about:
1 an optimizing native code compiler?
2 the commercial impact of such a compiler?

(If by any chance a commercial company is considering this, I am for hire)

/U. Magnusson
****************************************
* Ulf Magnusson, Swedish Developer
* UBM Computing
* Mail: ulf.magnusson at ubm-computing.com
* www: http://www.ubm-computing.com
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