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Yes, I'm consistent in that. What I don't get is if that's the case, why is there such a focus on improving Python perf? At best they're getting marginal improvements on something that most Python devs claim they don't care about, and which they say is not important for Python as a language due to JIT, C interop, and so on.

OutOfHere 4 days ago [ - ]

I think perhaps their hope is that eventually Python can get to Go-level if not Rust-level performance if they keep up the optimizations. I do personally believe this to be possible. The motivating example is Julia, which is a high level language with low-level language's performance. After arriving there, developers will care.

ModernMech 4 days ago [ - ]

I agree, I think that's probably the hope. It's interesting you bring up Julia here because I was just reading the post about the 1.12 release and this comment struck me:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45524485

Particularly this part is relevent to the Python discussion:

  What is Julia's central conceit? It aims to solve "the two language" problem, i.e. the problem where prototyping or rapid development is done in a dynamic and interactive language like Python or MATLAB, and then moved for production to a faster and less flexible language like Rust or C++.

  This is exactly what the speaker in the talk addresses. They are still using Julia for prototyping, but their production use of Julia was replaced with Rust. I've heard several more anecdotal stories of the exact same thing occurring. Here's another high profile instance of Julia not making it to production:

  https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-used-to-prototype-wh...

  Julia is failing at its core conceit.

So that's the question I have right now: what is Python supposed to be? Is it supposed to be the glue language that is easy to use and bind together a system made from other languages? Or is it trying to be what Julia is, a solution to the two language problem. Because it's not clear Julia itself has actually solved that.

The reason I bring this up is because there's a lot of "cake having/eating" floating around these types of conversations -- that's it's possible to be all the things, without a healthy discussion of what the tradeoffs are in going that direction, and what that would me mean for the people who are happy with the way things are. These little % gains are all Python is going to achieve without actually asking the developer to sacrifice their development process in some way.

physicsguy 4 days ago [ - ]

I think Julia has largely not solved it because it is clunky to use for purposes other than scientific computing. Python can't be argued to be that, it's very nice for web development as well as scientific computing, the issue is just that for non-scientific computing use cases the perf. isn't great.

OutOfHere 4 days ago [ - ]

If you think Python is nice for scientific computing, you must have never tried Matlab. Python is pretty clunky in comparison in its syntax for scientific computing.

physicsguy 4 days ago [ - ]

I used MATLAB for about 5 years, and then Mathematica, before switching to Python. I even had a job offer to work at MathWorks in Cambridge in about 2014!

OutOfHere 3 days ago [ - ]

And you still think Python has superior matrix manipulation syntax? Because that's at the core of scientific computing.

physicsguy 3 days ago [ - ]

I think the syntax isn’t that important if I’m totally honest! The library support and ecosystem is much more useful to me than it ever was in MATLAB and tbh I use np.einsum for anything tricky and because performance is better anyway.

coldtea 2 days ago [ - ]

Never heard of people who didn't hate Matlab.