Is Python Really That Slow?
Is Python Really That Slow?
My standard response when someone asks me how I deal with Python being such a slow language is that Python is by far the fastest to write, cleanest, more maintainable programming language I know, and…
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Python is by far the fastest to write, cleanest, more maintainable programming language I know
Maintainable? I have not ever had to work with any large Python projects, but from what I have heard, maintenance is a large pain point.
Yup. Part of what makes python so easy and fast is the lack of things built into languages so they are maintainable in a large project.
Take duck typing. It's so easy when you have a small project that can fully understood by a developer. Get into a big project with 10000 classes and you need explicit classes and interfaces just to understand what is going on.
Python is by far one of the worst languages I've ever seen in relation to maintainability, second only to Javascript (due to missing types, which are fixed by Typescript).
Seriously, it's rare for a Python project with more than 1,000 lines to not turn into an absolute mess thanks to the layers upon layers of meta programming, weird edge cases and so on. There are whole bad patterns I've never seen beyond Python codebases.
Things are improving slowly thanks to type hints and so on, but they are still far from where they need to be. Python is used in even more dynamic ways than JS, so the type system needs to be more expressive than TS. You can't even define a function that appends two tuples with proper type hints!
There's one key qualifier in this sentence: I know. One's skill set matters, I guess...
Let me guess: The author knows Python, C, C++, Java and maybe PHP.
Also fastest to write? I'd say JS or Ruby are just as fast or barely slower.
What most people mean is that Python has great Libraries which do the thing you want without much fuss. But thats more on the libraries than on the language.
i’m proficient in all 3, and i can say with great certainty that generally python is far faster to write
certainly when you’re talking about JS rather than TS, and achiving a usable outcome rather than bashing together bug-ridden trash
I do not know Ruby, but Python has a lot of syntactic sugar that, if one becomes used to and proficient with it, makes writing much faster than other languages I know (including JavaScript).
Ruby has enough syntactic sugar to give you type 2 diabetes honestly.
It's not too bad if you strictly enforce Pyright, Pylint and Black.
But I have yet to work with Python code other than my own that does that. So in practice you are right.
There are dozens of us. Dozens!
i had the misfortune once of having to try to understand a >400kLoC python codebase in a critical position and let me tell you that maintainability is a Problem. the system was older than most of the best practices of today and had a structure i can only describe as "a duolith of sqlalchemy soup".