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Readers, do not listen to this false prophet! Heed not the lies of his silver tongue! The GIL has brought me great strife and suffering. If you do anything rem

Readers, do not listen to this false prophet! Heed not the lies of his silver tongue! The GIL has brought me great strife and suffering. If you do anything remotely performance then Python is pain. Also, Python performance is so cataclysmically bad that when you use Python it has a nasty habit of becoming needlessly performance critical.

baq 5y ago
if you're doing performance-critical work in Python, you're using the wrong tool and it's been always known and reiterated by Python developers themselves. Python is a glue language at heart. Complaining that it isn't performant is like complaining you can't drill a hole with a knife. Get a different tool and glue your stuff together.
- gpderetta 5y ago
  The issue is that a lot of things written in python very quickly becomes performance critical as it is so slow compared to anything around it. edit: I have ranted more than usual about python slowness in the last few weeks. The fact is that python is an otherwise great language, powerful, expressive but with a gentle learning curve and a great ecosystem, but the slowness of its primary implementation really drags it down (and because of the ecosystem it is hard to switch to a different implementation).
- forrestthewoods 5y ago
  > Python is a glue language at heart. Complaining that it isn't performant is like complaining you can't drill a hole with a knife. Get a different tool and glue your stuff together. I wish I could get a different tool. Unfortunately machine learning and data science live and breath Python. It’s an absolute disaster and there is no meaningful alternative. Jupyter Notebooks can also die in a fire. Go ahead and call Python glue and say to use a different tool if you want. Unfortunately Python is a black hole or inertia. The one and only good thing about Python is some really great libraries are written in Python. This has resulted in an environment where Python sucks but the cost to move to a language that doesn’t suck is astronomical. Maybe I am complaining I can’t drill a hole with a knife. Call me in 20 years when drills have been invented and knife lobby has been abolished.

baq 5y ago

if you're doing performance-critical work in Python, you're using the wrong tool and it's been always known and reiterated by Python developers themselves. Python is a glue language at heart. Complaining that it isn't performant is like complaining you can't drill a hole with a knife. Get a different tool and glue your stuff together.

gpderetta 5y ago
The issue is that a lot of things written in python very quickly becomes performance critical as it is so slow compared to anything around it. edit: I have ranted more than usual about python slowness in the last few weeks. The fact is that python is an otherwise great language, powerful, expressive but with a gentle learning curve and a great ecosystem, but the slowness of its primary implementation really drags it down (and because of the ecosystem it is hard to switch to a different implementation).
forrestthewoods 5y ago
> Python is a glue language at heart. Complaining that it isn't performant is like complaining you can't drill a hole with a knife. Get a different tool and glue your stuff together. I wish I could get a different tool. Unfortunately machine learning and data science live and breath Python. It’s an absolute disaster and there is no meaningful alternative. Jupyter Notebooks can also die in a fire. Go ahead and call Python glue and say to use a different tool if you want. Unfortunately Python is a black hole or inertia. The one and only good thing about Python is some really great libraries are written in Python. This has resulted in an environment where Python sucks but the cost to move to a language that doesn’t suck is astronomical. Maybe I am complaining I can’t drill a hole with a knife. Call me in 20 years when drills have been invented and knife lobby has been abolished.