3 ms·

Wouldn't numpy be the default choice for this type of work in Python?

• dahart 9y ago
  Yes, if you care a lot about performance. But there's a cognitive cost to numpy for me because I'm not completely fluent. It's much more difficult to prototype something, so I usually wait until I've iterated on a prototype and I know exactly what I want to do before I dive into numpy. Numpy also has an inside-out order of operations compared to using vanilla Python, the reason it's fast is because you put the inside of the loop on the outside of the code. That can make it really hard to iterate on structural changes in your code. You can lose a lot of the dev time advantages by going numpy first. Also a lot of people don't consider numpy to be a fair comparison when talking about Python's language performance. Because it's optimized compiled code underneath the Python binding, it's not representative of the speed of the Python interpreter.