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> although if you learn a hosted language, you're going to have to learn stuff about the ecosystem on which it is hosted I thought this at first, but then I th
by didibus 4y ago
> although if you learn a hosted language, you're going to have to learn stuff about the ecosystem on which it is hosted
I thought this at first, but then I thought if you take Python, which is hosted on the OS directly through CPython, so we can say Python is hosted on Windows or Linux.
Well it turns out, most people never need to interop directly with Windows or Linux APIs or any other C interop.
Python seems to have a different mindset here, where most of its value proposition are providing wrappers over C/Windows/Linux/Mac APIs.
Why does so much effort get put in maintaining all these wrappers in Python? Is it just attitude? Is it that those APIs are much worse then Java's enough that even C programmers using Python want to wrap them over using them directly?
- schmudde 4y agoThis is the most illustrative analogy. I suppose the answer is a little bit of both. Python numeric performance is a really interesting case. Those folks would certainly drop down to C. But my casual observation is that they would build the bridge when they came back above water. A lot of work went into this because Python performance has historically been quite bad for a Data Science/ML language. Part of this is the size of the community. But what is we also consider the Common Lisp community? Common Lisp is incredibly performant. A lot of work went into the underlying C libraries. Perhaps most of that was when the community was more vibrant. But still, a casual observation is that CL folk live in CL.