OT: why do people use python when it is slow?

[David DeWitt via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Wednesday, 14 October 2015 at 14:48:22 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
> On Wednesday, 14 October 2015 at 14:32:00 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 13 October 2015 at 23:26:14 UTC, Laeeth Isharc 
>> wrote:
>>> https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Python-so-popular-despite-being-so-slow
>>> Andrei suggested posting more widely.
>>
>> I was just writing some R code yesterday after playing around 
>> with D for a couple weeks. I accomplished more in an afternoon 
>> of R coding than I think I had in like a month's worth of 
>> playing around with D. The same is true for python.
>
> As someone who uses both D and Python every day, I find that - 
> once you are proficient in both - initial productivity is 
> higher in Python and then D starts to overtake as a project 
> gets larger and/or has stricter requirements. I hope never to 
> have to write anything longer than a thousand lines in Python 
> ever again.

That's true until you need to connect to other systems.  There 
are countless clients built for other systems thats are used in 
real world applications.  With web development the Python code 
really just becomes glue nowadays and api's.  I understand D is 
faster until you have to build the clients for systems to 
connect.  We have an application that uses Postgres, 
ElasticSearch, Kafka, Redis, etc. This is plenty fast and the 
productivity of Python is more than D as the clients for 
Elasticsearch, Postgres and various other systems are unavailable 
or incomplete.  Sure D is faster but when you have other real 
world systems to connect to and time constraints on projects how 
can D be more productive or faster?  Our python code essentially 
becomes the API and usage of clients to other systems which 
handle a majority of the hardcore processing.  Once D gets 
established with those clients and they are battle tested then I 
will agree.  To me productivity is more than the language itself 
but also building real world applications in a reasonable 
time-frame.  D will get there but is nowhere near where Python is.