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Comment by gnulinux | Hacker News Reader

I think your comment is well-intentioned (I upvoted) but I respectfully disagree. I think wanting Python to be a bit faster is similar to wanting Haskell to have a little bit of mutability. Engineering with restrictions is a good thing, we can do great systems in Haskell because it's a very neat language even though it lacks mutability. We also can do great systems in Python because it's a very neat language even though it's a bit slow. Sure, you can always optimize Python's performance, that's a legitimate problem and it takes a few engineers to solve it. But it's more interesting to work around Python's slowness by engineering tricks such as better algorithms etc.

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That's not a great analogy. Haskell is a neat language in part because it doesn't have mutability. Python is a neat language despite being slow.

I can't imagine anyone would object if Python could magically be 10x faster. I can't say the same thing for the Haskell thing.

My whole point is that 10x thing cannot just magically happen. The reason Python is slow is not incompetent programming or lack of magic. We know why that's happening. Because every variable in Python interpreter is a hash map and pretty much every operation is a hash map lookup. How do you optimize this? The only way is to remove language features like `setattr` and my whole point is that some people use Python because it's flexible enough to do that so they need their `setattr`.

> The reason Python is slow is not incompetent programming or lack of magic. We know why that's happening. Because every variable in Python interpreter is a hash map and pretty much every operation is a hash map lookup.

This statement is easily refuted by PyPy. Here's a simple program which runs 70 times faster in PyPy than Python on my machine - including startup time:

     https://pastebin.com/2n0PL9hY

> How do you optimize this?

Semantically, everything in JavaScript and Lua is also hash map lookups. Yet very smart people have made those languages very fast. CPython is not slow for the reasons you stated.

Not all python programs are compatible with PyPy though. Nor do they get much of a performance boost by switching. Pandas and NumPy for example didn't work on PyPy until less than a year ago. And a good chunk of Python codebases are going to use one of those at some point.

> Not all python programs are compatible with PyPy though.

I'm not sure how this is relevant to my reply... I didn't say PyPy was a replacement for Python. I said PyPy, Lua, and JavaScript are existence proofs that dynamic "hash table" languages don't have to be slow. Therefore, CPython must be slow for some other reason.

Pypy can't accelerate the Pandas/Numpy part anyway, the computationally intensive code in Numpy and Pandas is coded in C, C++ or Fortran.

Though there are a lot of if isInstance(Foo, bar) that could be avoided in a statically typed language.

> Sure, you can always optimize Python's performance, that's a legitimate problem and it takes a few engineers to solve it. But it's more interesting to work around Python's slowness by engineering tricks such as better algorithms etc.

Surely you're not implying that improving Python's performance would preclude finding interesting algorithms, nor that this is a suitable rationale for keeping Python slow? Anyway, algos can only get you so far when they're built on slow primitives (all data scattered haphazardly across the heap, every property access is a hash table lookup, every function call is a dozen C function calls, etc).

> I think wanting Python to be a bit faster is similar to wanting Haskell to have a little bit of mutability

I'm sorry but that makes zero sense. Haskell is defined by immutability. People want to use haskell because of that characteristic. I don't want to use python because it is slow.

Sorry I disagree. There is definitely a sense in which Haskell is desirable because it is immutable, e.g. I myself love immutable data structures, it certainly makes it desirable. But my point is that it puts a restriction. Now you cannot implement algorithms that need mutability such as hash maps. It is easy to circumvent such problems but one other way is basically introducing mutability to Haskell which totally doesn't make sense. I think same goes for python, if you want to make it significantly faster then you need to face certain trade-offs: maybe data model should be optimized, or maybe `int` shouldn't be arbitrary precision integers, or maybe there should be primitive types like `int`, `double` as in Java to increase performance. Truth is these are not Pythonic solutions, and just like mutability is not Haskell-esque, optimizing Python sacrifising these trade-offs is not Pythonic.

> one other way is basically introducing mutability to Haskell which totally doesn't make sense

It makes perfect sense, because Haskell is not "an immutable language". It's a language in which some things are immutable, and those that are not are explicitly indicated in the type system.

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