> Benchmarks are performance tests, not popularity tests. But presumably they're meant to test something that matters. And the popularity suggests that what's

> Benchmarks are performance tests, not popularity tests. But presumably they're meant to test something that matters. And the popularity suggests that what's being tested in this case doesn't. > But "useless" is way too strong. No language is so wonderful on all other dimensions that it can have something as basic as a function call be dozens of times slower than some other language and yet keep up with that other language in general. And yet Python does keep up with C in general. You might object that when a Python-based system outperforms a C-based system it's not running the same algorithm, or it's not really Python, and that would be technically true, but seemingly not in a way that matters. > if you're dismissing these sorts of things, you're throwing away real data Everything is data. The most important part of programming is often ignoring the things that aren't important.