Yes, Python Is Slow, and I Don’t Care

&gt;It’s more important to get stuff done than to make it go fast.<p>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 &quot;human-factors-oriented languages&quot;, and it now has the momentum. But there&#x27;s no intrinsic conflict - there exist languages now that are arguably intrinsically better along every conceivable metric.

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.

Python is actually pretty fast for some things. The string and I&#x2F;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&#x27;t beat a well written java programming, but you can come a long way with very little code.<p>Pointless things like this comes to mind: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;juditacs&#x2F;wordcount&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;README.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;juditacs&#x2F;wordcount&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;README.md</a><p>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.

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

a discussion, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14024486" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14024486</a>

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