Python and the need for speed
Rick Johnson
rantingrickjohnson at gmail.com
Tue Apr 11 19:41:41 EDT 2017
On Tuesday, April 11, 2017 at 10:31:16 AM UTC-5, bartc wrote:
> On 11/04/2017 15:56, Steve D'Aprano wrote:
>
> > The truth is, all of us in this discussion -- including me
> > -- are "random, ignorant commentators". I don't believe
> > that any of us are experts at writing compilers. Bart is
> > a possible exception, for some definition of "expert" --
> > he claims to have written a quite fast, moderately dynamic
> > language, but nobody else (that I know of) has used it.
> > And no offence to Bart, but from his comments and
> > questions on the list, I think it is fair to say that
> > whatever knowledge he has on language design was probably
> > state of the art thirty years ago. Bart sometimes
> > expresses surprise and confusion over concepts which are
> > common in languages like Javascript, Python, Perl, Ruby
> > etc. These are not young languages! Python is over 20
> > years old, Perl is even older. So I suspect Bart's
> > knowledge is probably from the 70s or 80s?
>
> Yes, about then. But it means I have a lot of experience
> getting this stuff to work briskly on limited hardware, and
> I can identify bloat and inefficiency.
A _very_ good point, and kudoes to you for having a thick
skin. The truth is, our modern hardware masks the
inefficacy of our modern high level languages. Heck, Python
could have never survived on 1970s hardware. It would have
been laughable to even suggest something as inefficient as
Python.
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