Rather than focussing on the raw number compare to python 3.5 or so. It's still getting significantly faster.
If they keep doing this steady pace they are slowly saving the planet!
While very very very popular, Python is i think is very disliked languages, it doesnt have or it is not built around the current programming language features that programmers like, its not functional or immutable by default, its not fast, the tooling is complex, it uses indentation for code blocks (this feature was cool in the 90s, but dreaded since at least 2010)
so i guess if python become fasters, this will ensure its continued dominance, and all those hoping that one day it will be replace by a nicer , faster language are disappointed
this pessimism is the aching voice of the developers who were hoping for a big python replacement
LOL this is a dead giveaway you haven't been around long. There have been people kvetching about the whitespace since the beginning. Haskell went on to be the next big thing for reddit/HN/etc for years and it also uses whitespace.
but i also think that its true that python is not and have not been for a while considered as a modern or technically advanced language
the hype currently is for typed or gradually typed languages, functional languages, immutable data , system languages, type safe language, language with advanced parallelism and concurrency support etc ..
python is old , boring OOP, if you like it, than like millions of developers you are not picky about programming language, you use what works, what pays
but for devs passionate about programming languages, python is a relic they hope vanish
It is still the only beginner language that is also an industrial-strength production language. You can learn Python as your first language and also make an entire career out of it. That can't really be said about the currently "hyped" languages, even though those are very fun and cool and interesting!
If you asked me what language I would consider to be a relic that I hope would vanish, I'd go with Perl.
Such devs are increasingly rare and, in some domains, almost nonexistent. For example, Kotlin borrowed a lot of nice features from Scala and Groovy, yet 99% of Kotlin code I've seen professionally never touched those features. Kotlin on Android seems to be overwhelmingly written by barely (or not at all) re-trained Java devs; moreover, those who never learned anything more recent than 1.8 (at least they know what lambdas are.)
In short, it's not about the language; it's about the people who use that language. Wishing a language to vanish is misguided - it wouldn't change anything. The people would just switch to the next language and would still program in the same style. You can write Fortran in every language - this is as true today as it was back in the 70s, but the percentage of people who can't be bothered to stop writing Fortran (metaphorically, in more literal meaning their first language, whatever it was) even after changing to another language got much higher. IMO due to the changes in how programming as a trade is perceived in society... but that's perhaps a rant for another time :)
So Python with mypy
Statements like this are obviously untrue for large numbers of people, so I'm not sure of the point you're trying to make.
But certainly it's true that there are both objective and subjective reasons for using a particular tool, so I hope you are in a position to use the tools that you prefer the most. Have a great day!
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-admired-and-de...
Also, such a shame that it takes sooo long for crucial open source to be funded properly. Kudos to Microsoft for doing it, shame on everyone else for not pitching in sooner.
FYI Python was launched 32 years ago, Python 2 was released 24 years ago and Python 3 was released 16 years ago.
Microsoft hired Guido in late 2020 giving him freedom to choose what project he wanted. Guido decided to go back to core Python development and with approval of Microsoft created a "faster-cpython" project, at this point that project has hired several developers including some core CPython developers. This is all at the discretion of Microsoft, and is not some arms length funding arrangement.
Meta has a somewhat similar situation, they hired Sam Gross (not the cartoonist) to work on a Python non-gil project, and contribute it directly to CPython if they accept it (which they have), and they have publicly committed to support it, which if I remember right was something like funding two engineering years of an experienced CPython internals developer.
If you wanted to rebut this, you'd need to argue that Julia has always been awesome and that my experience with a slow warmup was atypical. But that would be a lie, right?
And, subtext: when I wrote my first commebt in this thread, its highest sibling led with
> I think the pessimism really comes from a dislike for Python
So I weighed in as a Python lover who is pessimistic for reasons other than a bias against the language.
But your assessment of the other language you mentioned is several years out of date and made largely irrelevant by the fast pace of progress. Therefore your conclusions about the probable future of Python, which may be correct, nevertheless do not follow.
How long did it take Julia to solve its warmup issue? The language is about 12, and I last tried in earnest two years ago. So, a decade, give or take? You speak from the top of a mountain, and you say the view is nice. Sitting at the base of a similar mountain, it's the journey that I dread, because Python's recent long-term journeys have been pretty rough. And I'm just not convinced that the destination is so great.
Amdahl's Law is about expected speedup/decrease in latency. That actually isn't strongly correlated to "saving the planet" afaik (where I interpret that as reducing direct energy usage, as well as embodied energy usage by reducing the need to upgrade hardware).
If anything, increasing speed and/or decreasing latency of the whole system often involves adding some form of parallelism, which brings extra overhead and requires extra hardware. Note that prefetching/speculative execution kind of counts here as well, since that is essentially doing potentially wasted work in parallel. In the past boosting the clock rate the CPU was also a thing until thermodynamics said no.
OTOH, letting your CPU go to sleep faster should save energy, so repeated single-digit perf improvements via wasting less instructions does matter.
But then again, that could lead to Jevons Paradox (the situation where increasing the efficiency encourages more wasteful than the increase in efficiency saves - Wirth's Law but generalized and older, basically).
So I'd say there's too many interconnected dynamics at play to really simply state "optimization good" or "optimization useless". I'm erring on the side of "faster Python probably good".