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this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Ah yes, those precious precious CPU cycles. Why spend one hour writing a python program that runs for five minutes, if you could spend three days writing it in C++ but it would finish in five seconds. Way more efficient!
Welp, microcontrollers say hi
Welp, I'm not saying you should use Python for everything. But for a lot of applications, developer time is the bottleneck, not computing resources.
Because when it is to actually get paid work done, all the bloat adds up and that 3 days upfront could shave weeks/months of your yearly tasks. XKCD has a topic abut how much time you can spend on a problem before effort outweighs productivity gains. If the tasks are daily or hourly you can actually spend a lot of time automating for payback
And note this is one instance of task, imagine a team of people all using your code to do the task, and you get a quicker ROI or you can multiply dev time by people
You can write perfectly well structured and maintainable code in Python and still be more productive than in other languages.
That also goes to show why to not waste 3 days to shave 2 seconds off a program that gets run once a week.
exactly! i prefer python or ruby or even java MUCH more than assembly and maybe C
I mean, I'd say it depends on what you do. When I see grad students writing numeric simulations in python I do think that it would be more efficient to learn a language that is better suited for that. And I know I'll be triggering many people now, but there is a reason why C and Fortran are still here.
But if it is for something small, yeah of course, use whatever you like. I do most of my stuff in R and R is a lot of things, but not fast.
or if you have a deadline and using something else would make you miss that deadline.