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167 Comments
- mcherm, on 11/13/2007, -2/+88Python has a reputation for being "too slow", but it's not particularly deserved. It comes from performing small, simple, numerical tasks -- an area which is commonly used for "shootout" style performance tests, but one at which Python performs quite poorly.
Python performs best in cases where it's ease of use and elegance of syntax allows you spend the time to write a better algorithm. Perhaps you use a hashtable instead of a linear lookup table because in Python it takes about two characters to define a hashtable: "x = {}". Or you need to perform a sort: Python's built-in list sort algorithm is carefully tuned to give rather impressive performance.
For cases where actual number slinging is needed, Python programs (should) use tools like Numeric - which are written in highly optimized C. Of course that's when using CPython (the "standard" implementation in C): Jython, and Iron Python run on the Java and .NET virtual machines and make use of the existing libraries for the corresponding platforms.
For other examples of people who found Python "fast enough" see here: http://pythonology.org/success - BossX, on 10/12/2007, -1/+75They probably are referring to the backend... such as Video conversion etc.
- Herolint, on 10/12/2007, -7/+81Dang, I've been telling everyone it was written in HTML.
- GIFF3, on 10/12/2007, -11/+82um no....
- lava, on 10/12/2007, -8/+72Somehow I feel that all the negative comments are from people who think that they can talk about programming because have seen two lines of javascript or php.
- pahoehoe, on 10/12/2007, -7/+63I do, and thanks for asking.
- Remmy, on 10/12/2007, -13/+62I was under the impression that YouTube was written in PHP.
http://youtube.com/results.php
http://youtube.com/my_videos.php
http://youtube.com/my_account.php - scuzzman, on 10/12/2007, -4/+43You realize that you're on a site that:
a) was built by "nerds"
b) started as a tech site and
c) is primarily populated by "nerds"
right, *****? - xmetal2001, on 10/12/2007, -3/+42The people who dugg the story. That's the beauty of digg. Obviously(abuse aside), people DO care.
- NetLogic, on 10/12/2007, -6/+42Backend
- sideshowRAHEEM, on 10/12/2007, -2/+38There's a Monty Python joke here somewhere but i'm just to lazy to think of it.
- FreakTrap, on 10/12/2007, -0/+32"Python is relatively new"
It's over fifteen years old. - jesusphreak, on 10/12/2007, -2/+32Python has been around since 1990. It isn't that new or that old.
- FearlessFreep, on 10/12/2007, -4/+31Me, I love programming in Python
- faulkner, on 10/12/2007, -5/+32you thought wrong, pardner.
for best results, use these whenever possible: dicts, psyco, ctypes, numpy, distributed computing, and the right algorithm for the right job. - strictnein, on 10/12/2007, -19/+46And all of MS's sites are written using ASP.NET using a mix of C# and VB.NET. Are we now going to trumpet that?
- NuPagady, on 10/12/2007, -2/+24If nobody would care about this "*****", such lame boys as you wouldn't be on the internet because there would be no internet.
- adolfojp, on 10/12/2007, -3/+25@Herolint
MMM... No.
ASP.NET provides a beautiful separation of the presentation layer and the control layer out of the box. Adding a few classes will provide you with a solid and simple MCV system.
The new visual studio encourages the use of CSS in the presentation layer with CSS auto completion and easy linking and switching of external stylesheets.
Visual Basic in the pre .NET era did encourage lousy coding practices. The new .NET strategy provides every tool necessary to create solid layered code in a logic and orderly fashion.
Of course, its ease of use for new and non programmers will allow unskilled people to just start dragging and dropping, but the fact that the software can be used by any idiot doesn't shift the blame for sloppy results away from the idiot. The only alternative would be to make the software harder to use and I don't know how that would be any better.
And yes, I've seen PHP programmers writing big balls of mud and spaghetti code entangled with the presentation layer and Ruby coders write entire apps inside of a method instead of abstraction layers or objects. It is not the platform's fault. It is the lousy coder's fault.
/ Works with .Net, Java and PHP and dabbles with Ruby and Python. - MajorHertz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+20I love how NASA has been using it for years but once we hear that a video streaming service uses it, its wonderful.
More information at python.org and http://www.python.org/about/quotes/ - jesusphreak, on 11/13/2007, -2/+20Because most for-profit software firms are firmly entrenched in the type of corporate culture that is heavily entrenched in Java and .NET - for good and bad.
- gdm9000, on 10/12/2007, -4/+21Python needs fan support because it has no big commercial backers, unlike .NET and Java. I personally find Python to be a huge productivity gain... um, wait... no, Python is a terrible language that I recommend you never look into!
- FearlessFreep, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16How many people can recommend it to their boss or manager if they can show successful usage?
- transeunte, on 10/12/2007, -2/+17It's written in English, fools!
- jesusphreak, on 10/12/2007, -2/+16I'm one of them. I started programming in Ruby and have since moved to Python. Certain parts of Python, like the module/packaging system are things I can't live without. Ruby also has the well-deserved reputation of being very slow, and I haven't had the same problems with performance in Python as I did Ruby.
Not to mention Python just ends up a lot more easier maintain a few months down the road. Ruby isn't as bad as Perl when it comes to readability and maintainability, but it is still pretty bad. - Herolint, on 11/13/2007, -2/+16@vbnz88
Python is anything but slow. It has good performance when running applications and is a huge improvement in speed over developing web applications (and regular programs too) in Java, .NET, and other web programming technologies.
I use Python extensively in my current job and have done so for the past 4 years. It has allowed me to deliver applications and automate processes and has helped me get a reputation as somebody who can get anything done and done quickly.
Personally, I love programming in Python. Kudos to all who develop it. - jesusphreak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14I've been using Python for about 6 months now, and I absolutely love the language. It produces some very maintainable and readable code (don't underestimate this), it has pretty good speed, has great library support, and has quite a few features that make programmers happy (list comprehensions - yay).
If you really are interested in programming, learn Python. It is just a very solid language, and its focus on 'simplicity' makes programming a joy. - FearlessFreep, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13"Because you have to have the python interpreter installed, python files don't compile to executables."
with py2exe you can ship it as an executable with dlls....no source code - lookitsbeige, on 10/12/2007, -8/+19You guys are all wrong. YouTube was written in 100% assembly code.
- gdm9000, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Check out http://www.tiobe.com/index.htm?tiobe_index. It shows that Python is the 7th most-used language in the enterprise, with 3.76% market share. Obviously somebody is using it. You just may not hear about it as much since it's more of a back-end glue language than an application development language. If you haven't looked into it, it's really a fantastic language.
- pozzoe, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12I googled python performance and the usual results are "it is slow, here are the synthetic benchmarks" or "it is fast, but I don't have numbers to back it".
Before you digg me down you must understand that I AM using python for server side development and in some experiments with procedural texturing.
In particular I use python on the procedural texturing experiments because it is a fast to write and easy to read language. And I don't get any hit in performance that I know of since I handle the actual rendering through bindings.
Also, I find the multi paradigm aspect very interesting.
What I say is... SHOW ME THE BENCHMARKS!!!!! - kokorhekkus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10You will never see most of the software written commercially since it's custom applications done by either consulting firms or inhouse development. That doesn't mean the software isn't for profit. Just that it isn't mass marketed.
Examples of firms that use python:
Industrial Light & Magic
AstraZeneca
Philips factory semiconductor line automization in Fishkill, NY
- Herolint, on 10/12/2007, -21/+30Actually, in all seriousness, I think ASP.NET and the .NET tools in general encourage poor programming practices. It seems to me like all the .NET tools and technologies are designed to cater to the average VB programmer, and that is really a shame.
- gdm9000, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11Um, then why are you here?
- Drealoth, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11Why yes, I want fries with that. Thanks.
- kanundrum, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7@championchap Flix is written in c but the api is accessible from c, java, php and python
- Remmy, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11@OhJay:
You know that PHP is a scripting language for development with the ability to output HTML, right?
Considering that account management, searching, subscriptions, messages, and comment processing are handled via PHP, I was under the assumption that they used something similar to ffmpeg-php to do conversions via PHP as well.
In any case, it's nice to see Python being mentioned in wide scale projects. It's a great language and doesn't get the recognition it deserves. - lustre, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Python is popular in several CGI houses, especially Blue Sky, for large-scale and intense content management and processing systems. They adore it.
- joe90210, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9I can't use Ruby after using Python for so long, ruby is paifully slow, tiny community, lack of libraries and the syntax makes me feel like I'm using a slightly improved version of Perl.
- MrPig, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Gentoo's good, Python's good. If you don't like your package tree don't use Portage or Gentoo. Python does not have the same uses as C++ or C. If you can't understand that, go hide under a rock.
- spudnic, on 10/12/2007, -11/+18Bum.
- brundlefly76, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9Why is everyone digging him down?
Python IS slow, even Guido says its slow, and has stated that he had wished he had known how important speed was to the community when he wrote it!
However, I think it is deceptive to say that YouTube is 'almost entirely Python'. The hardcore work of YouTube, namely video conversion and of course video display, may be 'glued together' with Python but is certainly performed by existing conversion tools written in C/C++ , and of course is displayed with an Adobe Flash video solution.
For 'gluing' together batch processes and generating HTML, it doesnt really matter what the performance of the language is within reason.
However, Python is *relatively* very slow, not as slow as Ruby, but just about!
http://www.usenetbinaries.com/doc/Web_Platform_Benchmarks.html - ucg1, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8"think of the scalability of a Python based system."
Any programmer who isn't completely retarded knows that "scalability" has little to do with what language you use and more to do with the architecture of your application. - gdm9000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Also, there is no commercial vendor pushing it. Sun and MS spend big money pushing Java and .NET, and industry gravitates to what they can buy support in. Currently nobody pushes Python. It's being adopted like Linux has been - techies see that it solves their problems and adopt it despite management. Incidentally, MS sees the value of dynamic languages and is beginning to promote a Python that was ported to .NET - Iron Python.
Google uses Python for their build process... - nlogax, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6It's actually named after Monty Python, because an important goal was to make it fun to use.
That's why you often see "spam" and "eggs" in example code. - fordicus, on 10/12/2007, -15/+21stop the presses!
- faulkner, on 10/12/2007, -7/+12ass-hats who shoot off their mouth about something they don't know anything about.
- randomvictim, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9Because you have to have the python interpreter installed, python files don't compile to executables. If it is in python and you have it, you have all the source code openly and easily available to be edited. For-profit businesses don't usually give you their source code when you buy their products.
- mustafya, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7For another cool application of Python...
www.eve-online.com
Eve is written in stackless python. The client and the server. Currently I think the max load on the game has been around 30k simultaneous users. I think this is a pretty good example of what Python can do. - leahculver, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Yeah, I did a real comparison of Rails vs. Django when I was picking a framework for rapid web development. I found that for a Mac OSX development environment, Django kicked Rail's ass. Better documentation and easier to set up.
- Yetimon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Hey - imagine a beowulf cluster of...
oh nevermind -
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