Surprisingly enough, I happen to have a talk when I discuss this precise topic, for people with a 30min to kill. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHF5Aius_Qs&feature=youtu...
I only point out that a list of optimization techniques that advocates nothing will be different than a list of optimization techniques that advocates certain abstractions at the expense of performance. And there's nothing sad about that.
It says "if you want performance don't do X because X is not a reasonable sacrifice". Then he linked to some better ones.
If you watch the linked talk, "write simple code when given the choice between simple and complex code" seems like fijal's main suggestion (and in my limited experience with PyPy has worked for me). The other main suggestion that I assume is underlying is "if you want performance try PyPy". Neither of those require sacrificing abstraction. Some of Guido's suggestions do.
He never said he doesn't advocate performance. He said performance should not be achieved by sacrificing abstractions.
>In addition, it sounds you mostly agree with regard to rewriting in C... use it as a last resort.
In CPython, not necessarily in Guido's advice, it's one of the first and most common things you hear about performance. "Just write parts of it in C".
If that was the advice of the early JVM guys ("just write parts of it in JNI"), we would never have gotten a fast JVM.
Agreed. But Guido didn't advocate performance, or anything, so fijal is trying to disagree with him about a topic he didn't state an opinion on. There's no need to make up a disagreement. Imagine if fijal instead said:
"This is a fine list of techniques if you are willing to sacrifice your abstractions. At PyPy, we're not willing to do that, and we still achieve sufficiently high performance by..."
You seem to be talking about PyPi: http://pypi.python.org/