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0 pointsjszymborski9y ago0 comments

I think that that's rather dismissive of a language that runs huge web, scientific, and general purpose applications daily.

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7 comments · 1 top-level

pjmlp9y ago· 6 in thread

It might be, but that it is usually a consequence of not knowing any better or making use of existing libraries.

Just like people learned 8-bit BASIC and went on to do business applications and games on it. I went Z80 ASM instead.

Personally I would only use Python for shell scripting and advise for using Julia instead.

Of course, others see it differently.

JPKab9y ago

Julia? Look, I enjoy playing with Julia, but have you actually used it? Because most of the people I meet who turn up their nose at Python and say nice things about Julia haven't ever used Julia. It's got great potential but has some major gaps and warts, and is just plain dog shit slow for certain things compared to SciPy, which, you may not be aware, is basically C and Fortran code wrapped in Python API.

tavert9y ago

> is just plain dog shit slow for certain things compared to SciPy

Do you have real examples here or is this just FUD? SciPy is not known for using absolute state of the art algorithms or perfectly optimized implementations. It can be pretty easy to improve on the naively implemented or legacy pieces of SciPy, e.g. http://tullo.ch/articles/python-vs-julia/

pjmlp9y ago

I do follow Julia development and I am aware that it isn't quite there, but at least their community does embrace JIT compilation, not like Python that PyPy is just yet another project, ignored by the reference implementation.

> SciPy, which, you may not be aware, is basically C and Fortran code wrapped in Python API.

Which for me personally means, that I would rather C and Fortran directly or better yet, a C++, .NET or Java binding to them.

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petters9y ago

This made be wary of Julia: http://danluu.com/julialang/

goatlover9y ago

Julia's nice, but it's playing catch up to R & Python. Name any statistical algorithm, and R probably has it. Name any scientific field, and there's probably a Python library for it.

wolf550e9y ago

Some people are very productive in Django and Rails (and the like), in non-performant languages. Many sites never grow to the size where running on the JVM (or AOT-compiled Go) would save you money from fewer servers vs. more coder-hours.

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