5 ms·

Haha wtf. After learning Haskell and seeing stuff like lparallel for CL, I just fundamentally can't pretend this is even worth learning. The GIL and the lack of

Haha wtf. After learning Haskell and seeing stuff like lparallel for CL, I just fundamentally can't pretend this is even worth learning. The GIL and the lack of foresight in designing Python are problems that are too fundamental to the language. I love python, I've used it for a long time, but using it as anything other than for readable shell scripting is a waste of time. It's using the wrong tool for the job. If you are worrying about speed aside from algorithms, learn a different language.

wahnfrieden 14y ago
Sometimes performance is unrelated to the ability to thread, so the GIL is not always a relevant issue.
JulianWasTaken 14y ago
Do you have examples of lack of foresight?
- jerf 14y ago
  There are many examples of things that people now call "lack of foresight", but I think people quickly gloss over just how long Python has been around. It started in December 1989, when the first Pentium was still three years into the future. If Guido had tried to "foresight" his way to a language with an acceptable multicore solution at that point (on any hardware he could afford), the only possible result is total failure. I don't think there are many attributes the language currently possesses that were truly that avoidable. Most people's snap suggestions result in incurring costs to the language that it may not be able to recover from when it is young. Personally, I think the truth is that Python is what it is; a very, very, very good OO language that has reached the mature stage of its life. It probably won't be able to make the leap to "true" multicore, and besides, even if it does it won't be likely to be very successful anyhow because it'll still be a very slow-but-powerful language. (There's very little point in taking a language very near the bottom of the Shootout and adding 4 or even 8 way parallelism to it, when you could just rewrite the target hotspot in C and get the same performance on one core. The math just doesn't favor trying to add lots of "multicore" to such a slow language. Python's one of my favorite languages, but that doesn't mean I can't see where it is weak.)
  - batgaijin 14y ago
    Haskell 1.0 was released in 1990.
    - hythloday 14y ago
      The "History of Haskell" paper, a fascinating read in and of itself, is replete with admissions of lack of foresight. The reason Haskell has fared better than Python is probably only that it has a much bigger emphasis on trying new ideas in the reference implementation. The biggest problems with "Python" (GIL, FFI, standard library) are mostly issues with the reference implementation. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/history-of-haskell/history.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...
      - jerf 14y ago
        And where Python entered production usage in the late 90s and was building up a huge community and a base of code and continued building that base all the way to the present time, Haskell didn't really begin that until around the mid-200xs. It may be an older language in calendar terms, but in terms of libraries and tooling support it's basically 5 years old or so.
  - fijal 14y ago
    PyPy (together with LuaJIT and tracemonkey) has been banned from shootout, partly because we complained about unfair rules. Looking at shootout to asses the relative performance of languages where you cannot compare high-performance implementations of a language is a very very bad idea. Looking at shootout to compare would very likely be a bad idea anyhow, but right now it's just completely useless.
    - lmm 14y ago
      Can you give details and/or a citation for the complaints and the banning? I use the shootout a lot to give me a rough idea of a specific language's properties, so if there are valid criticisms then I'd like to hear them, but your post doesn't really stand on its own to someone who doesn't know the backstory.
jspiral 14y ago
Did you read the article? There are some interesting ideas being explored, really just theory for now. I don't see it as asking you to learn anything unless you want to participate in theorycrafting. To me it seems like a waste of time to build crud websites in CL, but if people want to write articles about ways to make that experience better, i'm not going to write 'haha wtf' in response. (Yes, all analogies suck)
andybak 14y ago
You rather lack imagination if you can't think of an appropriate domain for using Python other than "readable shell scripting".
freyrs3 14y ago
> The GIL and the lack of foresight in designing Python are problems that are too fundamental to the language. The GIL isn't part of the Python language, it's part of the implementation of CPython. Jython for example doesn't have a GIL.

wahnfrieden 14y ago

Sometimes performance is unrelated to the ability to thread, so the GIL is not always a relevant issue.

JulianWasTaken 14y ago

Do you have examples of lack of foresight?

jerf 14y ago
There are many examples of things that people now call "lack of foresight", but I think people quickly gloss over just how long Python has been around. It started in December 1989, when the first Pentium was still three years into the future. If Guido had tried to "foresight" his way to a language with an acceptable multicore solution at that point (on any hardware he could afford), the only possible result is total failure. I don't think there are many attributes the language currently possesses that were truly that avoidable. Most people's snap suggestions result in incurring costs to the language that it may not be able to recover from when it is young. Personally, I think the truth is that Python is what it is; a very, very, very good OO language that has reached the mature stage of its life. It probably won't be able to make the leap to "true" multicore, and besides, even if it does it won't be likely to be very successful anyhow because it'll still be a very slow-but-powerful language. (There's very little point in taking a language very near the bottom of the Shootout and adding 4 or even 8 way parallelism to it, when you could just rewrite the target hotspot in C and get the same performance on one core. The math just doesn't favor trying to add lots of "multicore" to such a slow language. Python's one of my favorite languages, but that doesn't mean I can't see where it is weak.)
- batgaijin 14y ago
  Haskell 1.0 was released in 1990.
  - hythloday 14y ago
    The "History of Haskell" paper, a fascinating read in and of itself, is replete with admissions of lack of foresight. The reason Haskell has fared better than Python is probably only that it has a much bigger emphasis on trying new ideas in the reference implementation. The biggest problems with "Python" (GIL, FFI, standard library) are mostly issues with the reference implementation. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/history-of-haskell/history.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...
    - jerf 14y ago
      And where Python entered production usage in the late 90s and was building up a huge community and a base of code and continued building that base all the way to the present time, Haskell didn't really begin that until around the mid-200xs. It may be an older language in calendar terms, but in terms of libraries and tooling support it's basically 5 years old or so.
- fijal 14y ago
  PyPy (together with LuaJIT and tracemonkey) has been banned from shootout, partly because we complained about unfair rules. Looking at shootout to asses the relative performance of languages where you cannot compare high-performance implementations of a language is a very very bad idea. Looking at shootout to compare would very likely be a bad idea anyhow, but right now it's just completely useless.
  - lmm 14y ago
    Can you give details and/or a citation for the complaints and the banning? I use the shootout a lot to give me a rough idea of a specific language's properties, so if there are valid criticisms then I'd like to hear them, but your post doesn't really stand on its own to someone who doesn't know the backstory.

jspiral 14y ago

Did you read the article? There are some interesting ideas being explored, really just theory for now. I don't see it as asking you to learn anything unless you want to participate in theorycrafting. To me it seems like a waste of time to build crud websites in CL, but if people want to write articles about ways to make that experience better, i'm not going to write 'haha wtf' in response. (Yes, all analogies suck)

andybak 14y ago

You rather lack imagination if you can't think of an appropriate domain for using Python other than "readable shell scripting".

freyrs3 14y ago

> The GIL and the lack of foresight in designing Python are problems that are too fundamental to the language. The GIL isn't part of the Python language, it's part of the implementation of CPython. Jython for example doesn't have a GIL.