python simply not scaleable enough for google?

[Vincent Manis]

On 2009-11-13, at 17:42, Robert Brown wrote, quoting me: 

> ... Python *the language* is specified in a way that
> makes executing Python programs quickly very very difficult.  
That is untrue. I have mentioned before that optional declarations integrate 
well with dynamic languages. Apart from CL and Scheme, which I have mentioned 
several times, you might check out Strongtalk (typed Smalltalk), and Dylan, 
which was designed for high-performance compilation, though to my knowledge
no Dylan compilers ever really achieved it. 

> I'm tempted to
> say it's impossible, but great strides have been made recently with JITs, so
> we'll see.

> If you want to know why Python *the language* is slow, look at the Lisp code
> CLPython generates and at the code implementing the run time.  Simple
> operations end up being very expensive.  Does the object on the left side of a
> comparison implement compare?  No, then does the right side implement it?  No,
> then try something else ....
I've never looked at CLPython. Did it use a method cache (see Peter Deutsch's 
paper on Smalltalk performance in the unfortunately out-of-print `Smalltalk-80:
Bits of History, Words of Advice'? That technique is 30 years old now.

I have more to say, but I'll do that in responding to Bob's next post.

-- v