Python and Flaming Thunder

[Luis Zarrabeitia]

On Tuesday 13 May 2008 01:05:38 pm Dave Parker wrote:
> The websites owners might not be unhappy, but lots of customers
> complain about slow websites, so if the market is competitive then
> eventually the PHP fad will die out.

On my [modest] experience, bandwidth trumps code speed by a large fraction. My 
experience is tainted, though, with me living in Cuba and Cuba having almost 
no bandwidth available.

> For example, Slashdot recently interviewed a successful website in a
> competitive market -- online newspapers -- and found that to enhance
> customer happiness the New York Times uses hand-coded HTML.
>
> "He was asked how the Web site looks so consistently nice and polished
> no matter which browser or resolution is used to access it. His answer
> begins: 'It's our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite,
> TextPad or TextMate, to "hand code" everything, rather than to use a
> wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program,
> like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.'"

So, they edit the HTML code by hand. The interview explicitly mentions the 
features "consistently nice and polished", not "faster to compute". You can 
always throw more hardware when the problem is about speed. The real edge on 
your competitive marked should be the "consistently nice and polished", and 
neither python, nor [I hope] Flaming Thunder is going to help you with that.

> "Faster" wins in a competitive market, so if a programming language
> can't deliver "faster", it is a fad that will die out.

I find it more likely that the users are more concerned about how quickly the 
latest tidbit reaches your frontpage than with the extra few milisenconds 
achieved by switching the programming language or throwing another server in 
the cluster.


-- 
Luis Zarrabeitia (aka Kyrie)
Fac. de Matemática y Computación, UH.
http://profesores.matcom.uh.cu/~kyrie