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Yes, Python is Slow, and I Don’t Care

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Re: Yes, Python is Slow, and I Don’t Care

#41

Post by agentgt »

wheaties wrote: post #35
agentgt wrote: post #29

Unless we are talking like circa 1999 I don't think I have heard a complaint yet that Python is slow. I'm curious who or where the author heard that from (not specifically the people themselves but the domain they are in). What I have heard complaints about Python are (and I don't agree with all these points): * Its not statically typed * The python 2/3 compatibility * It has some design flaws: GIL, variable assignin…

Oh, I've heard "Python is slow" from Node folks, Java folks, Scala folks (in terms of productivity) and of course, die hard C++ fans. I'm a fan of Python but i also like languages with a stronger FP bent (and statically typed.)

> Oh, I've heard "Python is slow" from Node folks, Java folks, Scala folks (in terms of productivity)

I have hard time believing Java folks made an argument on productivity unless you meant for that parenthetical statement to be only applied to Scala. Regardless productivity is a far more complicated than raw speed (particularly if you get into maintenance as some languages are easy to pump out code but harder to maintain... oh perl.. the pain...).

And yeah I have seen the C++ folks complain about Python but this in my experience has been video game programming which is clearly not the domain the author is in or talking about (I think given the microservice discussions). Hence why I would like to know more about these folks complaining.

Re: Yes, Python is Slow, and I Don’t Care

#42

Post by dom96 »

nerdwaller wrote: post #33
dom96 wrote: post #12

The fact that Python is slow isn't its only problem. What I care more about nowadays is wasting my time hunting bugs that could have been avoided by a static type system.

Have you checked out MyPy and the optional type hinting? I've been going that route in my python recently and been liking the both/and of having an optional type checker.

I have, and I do like that Python is heading in this direction. But this feature does still feel half-baked to me, the error messages are often confusing and I do recall running into a few bugs along the way. I'm also not certain that the type hinting will ever be 100%, the dynamic nature of Python seems to prevent that. This could end up giving some people a false sense of correctness.

Re: Yes, Python is Slow, and I Don’t Care

#43

Post by dec0dedab0de »

simonh wrote: post #27
scarface74 wrote: post #20

I was all ready to savage his opinion after reading the headline but I agree looking at my architecture that I designed for the company I work for, CPU isn't the bottleneck. Every time I try to increase performance by multi threading as much as possible, the databases start screaming. On the other hand, the idea that dynamic languages are more productive than static languages are laughable. Statically type languages…

'Dynamic languages' is too often used as a shorthand, or interchangeable with 'scripting language', as here. There are a ton of more relevant language features when it comes to productivity, automatic memory management being the biggest IMHO. Interpreted vs compiled makes a difference too because your code->launch->test cycle can be so fast. But I agree, I'm a huge Python fan and even though I appreciate not having t…

You could have static duck typing, so declarations wouldn't be an issue. Though, for the most part I like Python just the way it is. I actually hate when a library tries to check types, instead of just using whichever object I passed it.

Re: Yes, Python is Slow, and I Don’t Care

#44

Post by thekaleb »

scarface74 wrote: post #20

I was all ready to savage his opinion after reading the headline but I agree looking at my architecture that I designed for the company I work for, CPU isn't the bottleneck. Every time I try to increase performance by multi threading as much as possible, the databases start screaming. On the other hand, the idea that dynamic languages are more productive than static languages are laughable. Statically type languages…

MyPy provides some useful type-checking for python. I have not had a chance to use it in production code because we are still stuck on python 2 due to Google AppEngine standard not supporting python 3.

Re: Yes, Python is Slow, and I Don’t Care

#45

Post by fiatjaf »

> It’s more important to get stuff done than to make it go fast.

This is not a real absolute. It is only valid when what you have to run will not benefit a lot from performance or suffer a lot from lack of it.

The real guidance you can have in these matters is: how many times is my code going to run per second?

Some programs are written to be run once a day, others 10000000 times in a second. The first ones should be written in the language you're most productive in, the second ones in the fastest possible language.

Re: Yes, Python is Slow, and I Don’t Care

#46

Post by christophilus »

ageofwant wrote: post #36
dom96 wrote: post #12

The fact that Python is slow isn't its only problem. What I care more about nowadays is wasting my time hunting bugs that could have been avoided by a static type system.

You only pay the the price while debugging. In your static language you pay the price continually. You are wasting orders of magnitude more time fighting your language's type system every day, you have to read reams of boilerplate code that are unrelated to the problem at hand, each extra line increases the attack surface and complexity of your code.

Having worked in both dynamic and statically typed systems, I don't think this is true. A good statically typed language doesn't get in your way very often, and it doesn't produce any more boilerplate than doc comments do in dynamic languages. You do write doc comments, right?

In fact, I'd say that most of the time, a good statically typed language does the opposite of get in your way. It helps you w/ refactoring tools, better intellisense and editor help, self-documentation, etc. The older a codebase gets, the more helpful a static type system is.

That said, there are statically typed languages which produce a ton of boilerplate (Java used to, at least), and there are those that don't (F# comes to mind).

The only dynamically typed language I've used where I didn't regularly miss static typing is Clojure. (Elixir may fit the bill, but the jury's still out on that.)

Re: Yes, Python is Slow, and I Don’t Care

#47

Post by vog »

blumomo wrote: post #16
dom96 wrote: post #12

The fact that Python is slow isn't its only problem. What I care more about nowadays is wasting my time hunting bugs that could have been avoided by a static type system.

Please tell me, do you write tests? I've learned that it's necessary. I do 100% code coverage and I'm enjoying TDD a lot.

If you haven't already tried, I recommend to port [1] a Python program to OCaml, F# or Haskell.

There are so many tests you can throw away, so many corner cases you don't need to test anymore. (I'm talking about tests that you can't even write down without getting a compiler error.) Not to mention the assertions within your functions that aren't needed anymore.

And those little type annotations are so much simpler and easier to write down than corresponding tests.

If you really head for 100% testing, not just code coverage, but also all corner cases, you will love the modern static type systems. (However, you should really use an ML type system, because doing the same with Java or C++ is cumbersome and not much fun.)

[1] I did so for my mathematics diploma thesis, starting implementing my formalism in Python, having lots of trouble when refactoring, then moving all code to OCaml and then being able to refactor the code alongside the developing formalism in the thesis.

Re: Yes, Python is Slow, and I Don’t Care

#49

Post by asah »

ageofwant wrote: post #36
dom96 wrote: post #12

The fact that Python is slow isn't its only problem. What I care more about nowadays is wasting my time hunting bugs that could have been avoided by a static type system.

You only pay the the price while debugging. In your static language you pay the price continually. You are wasting orders of magnitude more time fighting your language's type system every day, you have to read reams of boilerplate code that are unrelated to the problem at hand, each extra line increases the attack surface and complexity of your code.

This.

Let me add a radical point: static typing is often thrown out anyway, when you encode your data as strings, serialize/marshal it, create polymorphic lists and hierarchical data structures, etc etc

Meanwhile, disciplined use of python is perfectly easy to get right: - use pylint - be ruthlessly consistent in naming classes, methods and variables (which pylint helps btw,) - for large projects, consider mypy etc

Re: Yes, Python is Slow, and I Don’t Care

#50

Post by VT_Drew »

blumomo wrote: post #16
dom96 wrote: post #12

The fact that Python is slow isn't its only problem. What I care more about nowadays is wasting my time hunting bugs that could have been avoided by a static type system.

Please tell me, do you write tests? I've learned that it's necessary. I do 100% code coverage and I'm enjoying TDD a lot.

>I'm enjoying TDD a lot

Meh, test are great in so far as they can help you not break things if you upgrade the framework, or langauge in the future. But other than that I have to agree with Kent Beck's sentiment of "I get paid for code that works, not for tests".

https://istacee.wordpress.com/2013/09/18/kent-beck-i-get-pai...

If I had started out trying to learn Django using TDD as in this tutorial:

http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000000754/index.ht...

I never would have learned Django. I would have given up with the ridiculous slow progress of results and functionality.

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