New Python 3.0 string formatting - really necessary?

[Roy Smith]

In article 
<6b4176c3-49ce-4e7c-bced-07d8d19bc0f4 at s20g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>,
 r <rt8396 at gmail.com> wrote:

> You can't just blindly Parrot off.. "well CPU's get faster every
> year".

Sure you can :-)  There was a nice treatment of this on slashdot today 
(http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001198.html).  The executive 
summary is I'm willing to accept that Python is (big handwave) 10x slower 
than C++, because *I'm* 10x faster writing in Python than I am in C++, and 
I cost more than my computer.

Moore's laws says (small handwave) CPU speed doubles every 24 months.  At 
that rate, and assuming I remember enough high-school algebra to solve a 
compound interest problem, hardware gets 10% faster every 3 months.  If 
Python gets 10% slower every 10 years or so, it's ahead of the curve.