
Yes, Python Is Slow, and I Don’t Care - drewjaja
https://hackernoon.com/yes-python-is-slow-and-i-dont-care-13763980b5a1
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dTal
>It’s more important to get stuff done than to make it go fast.

Hmpth. Why must I choose? Python is very poorly - even perversely - designed
from a performance perspective. I suspect the only reason we use it is because
it was an early offering amongst "human-factors-oriented languages", and it
now has the momentum. But there's no intrinsic conflict - there exist
languages now that are arguably intrinsically better along every conceivable
metric.

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DarkKomunalec
There seems to be an unstated assumption that dynamic types cause slower code,
but aid productivity. But I find static types greatly help me reason about a
program, and when doing python, I resort to extensive documentation of
function arguments and return values, as a poor substitute for static types.

~~~
wutbrodo
Yea seriously. I'm kind of surprised to see this here: outside of places that
are absolutely performance-critical, my complaint and most of the complaints
about Python that I hear from people who know what they're talking about is
that doing a medium to large project in it is a lot more difficult from the
perspective of code readability. This gets multiplied by a million if you're
working with engineers who aren't super great, or who are overall great but
have a couple bad habits. I'm currently in a Python codebase with ~4 engineers
on it, and even with this relatively small team Python is permissive enough to
let them do some pretty horrifying things. Dealing with these choices usually
cost us far more eng time than the two minutes spent to design something well
would have cost them.

I like the language overall, in part because it allows mediocre engineers to
become quickly productive and you can't always hire 100% excellent engineers.
But this main downside is in fact a downside.

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Johnny_Brahms
Python is actually pretty fast for some things. The string and I/O operations
are all written in decently fast C, so some types of problems are actually a
good fit for python, speed wise. It won't beat a well written java
programming, but you can come a long way with very little code.

Pointless things like this comes to mind:
[https://github.com/juditacs/wordcount/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/juditacs/wordcount/blob/master/README.md)

Two persons in the #guile irc channel tried hard to make a guile version run
faster than the python3 version, and after a long time got it on par with it,
and guile2.2 is usually about 3-5x faster than python in my completely
unscientific benchmarks.

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Chloro
Go is just as fast, easy, and clean to write and is leagues faster.

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brudgers
a discussion,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14024486](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14024486)

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CyberDildonics
your users care

