3 ms·

not caring about performance destroys faith in projects. if the things we write can't be as performant as we like, we'll use a different language and your proje

by imode 10y ago

not caring about performance destroys faith in projects. if the things we write can't be as performant as we like, we'll use a different language and your project will fade. pretty simple concept. surprised that people don't understand that. (mind you, python is about as performant as I like for the tasks I use it for, so ymmv with the above.)

nhumrich 10y ago
> if things we write can't be as performant as we like, we'll use a different language I think you are referring to the fact that devs LIKE speed. And they want things to be fast. I mean, your right. We like speed. Probably a lot more than we should. But those who only care about speed simply wont have as successful careers as those who care about productivity (10xers?), unless your lucky enough to be put on a project that is designed entirely for speed. Lots and lots of tools exist that are "slow", but we use them over faster alternative's because of the features they provide. One simple example is IDE's. I think its pretty narrow-viewed to say all projects will fade because they aren't "as fast as they can be". Everything only needs to be fast enough.
tachyonbeam 10y ago
I think part of the issue is that Python has been the king scripting language on the desktop. It's been quite successful, and so all these people go "you see, performance doesn't really matter, since Python is succeeding without it". What they fail to realize is that JS, for instance, can reach about 50% of the speed of C code nowadays. If Python could be that fast, you could use it to write videogames and all other kinds of software that you can't realistically write in Python today. It could displace a lot of C++ code. The poor performance of Python is actually limiting its adoption. Python has poor performance, and a very poor handling of multithreading, at a time when single-core performance is stagnating. I think it's inevitable that people will start migrating away from it eventually. I mean, if you could have something like Python, but 20x better performance, would you take it?

by imode 10y ago

nhumrich 10y ago

> if things we write can't be as performant as we like, we'll use a different language I think you are referring to the fact that devs LIKE speed. And they want things to be fast. I mean, your right. We like speed. Probably a lot more than we should. But those who only care about speed simply wont have as successful careers as those who care about productivity (10xers?), unless your lucky enough to be put on a project that is designed entirely for speed. Lots and lots of tools exist that are "slow", but we use them over faster alternative's because of the features they provide. One simple example is IDE's. I think its pretty narrow-viewed to say all projects will fade because they aren't "as fast as they can be". Everything only needs to be fast enough.

tachyonbeam 10y ago

I think part of the issue is that Python has been the king scripting language on the desktop. It's been quite successful, and so all these people go "you see, performance doesn't really matter, since Python is succeeding without it". What they fail to realize is that JS, for instance, can reach about 50% of the speed of C code nowadays. If Python could be that fast, you could use it to write videogames and all other kinds of software that you can't realistically write in Python today. It could displace a lot of C++ code. The poor performance of Python is actually limiting its adoption. Python has poor performance, and a very poor handling of multithreading, at a time when single-core performance is stagnating. I think it's inevitable that people will start migrating away from it eventually. I mean, if you could have something like Python, but 20x better performance, would you take it?