When Python outruns C++ ...

[Robin Becker]

In article <b6fmcq$dh0$1 at panix2.panix.com>, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com>
writes


>People have been commiting crimes against good design in the name of
>efficiency since punchcard days.  When I first learned C, it was on a
>pdp-11, where the compiler could put three variables per function in
>fast registers.  My major goal in refactoring (although we didn't call
>it that in those days) was to design functions that made extensive use
>of no more than three integers or pointers.
>
>Just a couple of weeks ago, I let the efficiency bug bite me and spent
>two days totally tearing apart a C++ class to make it use a different
>set of STL containers.  The savings?  I turned a rarely-used linear
>operation (where N <= 24 most of the time) into a constant-time
>operation.  Totally meaningless to overall performance, but once the
>bug bit, it was hard to stop myself :-)
>
>The dark side of the force is seductive.  It tries to make us
>efficient, even at the cost of clarity and maintainability.  In that
>way lies bit-twiddling and assembler language and soldering irons.  We
>must be diligent in our fight against it.

The Python community sometimes has the efficiency bug. As examples the
desire to optimize global access (ie forbidding 'from module import *'
in inner scopes) and more recently the proposal to inhibit shadowing of
builtin functions in certain circumstances. It seems people never learn
to make regularity a priority. Nobody uses those special cases anyhow
etc etc

Interestingly attempts to get an integer for loop (without range/xrange)
are met with extreme disapproval by the language gurus and the fastest
looping constructs of all map, filter et al are considered bad form.

-- 
Robin Becker