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

[John Colvin via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Wednesday, 14 October 2015 at 15:25:22 UTC, David DeWitt wrote:
> 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.

Python is inherently quite good for glue and has great library 
support, so if that's the majority of your work then Python is a 
good choice. On the other hand, there's plenty of programming out 
there that isn't like that.