If you don't like the characterization as a panacea, what would you prefer - jack of all trades maybe? All-purpose language ?
> This has been discussed again and again on HN, and the answer to it still stands to this day. So now I'm not giving you the benefit of the doubt.
I'd guess you're thinking you'll measure and just rewrite the hot code paths. The problem is in too many cases when industrialising software it's basically all hot, the heatmap just all glows red. Google people did talks about this maybe a decade ago, it's why Go ended up getting internal support, because if you write software the first time in a language with better performance you don't need to do the rewrite.
I think Python's actual strength is as a language for people whose job isn't primarily to write software. Let me give an example of a choice Python made (admittedly not for years) that is exactly what you should do for that audience, and then the opposite:
Ordered Dictionaries make dict have reasonable performance and yet also behave how naive users who have only a limited understanding of how the machine works would expect, which means they produce less buggy software in practice
Multiple Inheritance is too complicated to teach to a class of say, Geographers, and yet it's not really crucial for the underpinnings of the language, so why go to such lengths to support this feature ?
If you don't like the characterization as a panacea, what would you prefer - jack of all trades maybe? All-purpose language ?
> This has been discussed again and again on HN, and the answer to it still stands to this day. So now I'm not giving you the benefit of the doubt.
I'd guess you're thinking you'll measure and just rewrite the hot code paths. The problem is in too many cases when industrialising software it's basically all hot, the heatmap just all glows red. Google people did talks about this maybe a decade ago, it's why Go ended up getting internal support, because if you write software the first time in a language with better performance you don't need to do the rewrite.
I think Python's actual strength is as a language for people whose job isn't primarily to write software. Let me give an example of a choice Python made (admittedly not for years) that is exactly what you should do for that audience, and then the opposite:
Ordered Dictionaries make dict have reasonable performance and yet also behave how naive users who have only a limited understanding of how the machine works would expect, which means they produce less buggy software in practice
Multiple Inheritance is too complicated to teach to a class of say, Geographers, and yet it's not really crucial for the underpinnings of the language, so why go to such lengths to support this feature ?