[Python-Dev] Re: 2.4 news reaches interesting places (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum gvanrossum at gmail.com
Sat Dec 11 17:22:17 CET 2004

fwiw, IDG's Computer Sweden, "sweden's leading IT-newspaper" has a surprisingly big Python article in their most recent issue:

PYTHON FEELS WELL Better performance biggest news in 2.4 and briefly interviews swedish zope-developer Johan Carlsson and Python- Ware co-founder Håkan Karlsson.

Maybe we've done this to ourselves then. I'm sure the interviewer didn't know what was the biggest news until after Johan and Håkan told him. And this despite all the functional improvements that are much more interesting for most Python programmers: generator expressions, decorators, a ton of new modules...

Ah, but several of those modules are rewrites in C of modules that were previously written in Python. Maybe we really should stop emphasizing speed so much to ourselves, and focus more on fixing bugs and adding features instead of looking for speedup opportunities.

I think Python's message ought to be more something like "programming for the rest of us -- a child can learn Python, but Python's no toy."

BTW I strongly disagree that making easy .EXE binaries available will address this issue; while not bundled, there are plenty of solutions for maning .EXEs for those who need them, and this is not something that typically worries managers. But the perception of Python as "slow" does worry managers.

(Wish I could add more to this thread but my family is calling...)

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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