python simply not scaleable enough for google?

Rustom Mody rustompmody at gmail.com
Tue Nov 17 11:41:42 EST 2009


"Language L is (in)efficient. No! Only implementations are (in)efficient"

I am reminded of a personal anecdote.  It happened about 20 years ago
but is still fresh and this thread reminds me of it.

I was attending some workshop on theoretical computer science.
I gave a talk on Haskell.

I showed off all the good-stuff -- pattern matching, lazy lists,
infinite data structures, etc etc.
Somebody asked me: Isnt all this very inefficient?
Now at that time I was a strong adherent of the Dijkstra-religion and
this viewpoint "efficiency has nothing to do with languages, only
implementations" traces to him. So I quoted that.

Slowing the venerable P S Thiagarajan got up and asked me:
Lets say that I have a language with a type 'Proposition'
And I have an operation on proposition called sat [ sat(p) returns
true if p is satisfiable]...

I wont complete the tale other than to say that Ive never had the wind
in my sails taken out so completely!

So Vincent? I wonder what you would have said in my place?



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