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

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Wednesday, 14 October 2015 at 18:17:29 UTC, Russel Winder 
wrote:
> On Wed, 2015-10-14 at 14:48 +0000, John Colvin via 
> Digitalmars-d-learn 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-s
>> > > low
>> > > 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.
>
> The thing about Python is NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, 
> IPython, Jupyter, GNU Radio. The data science, bioinformatics, 
> quant, signal provessing, etc. people do not give a sh!t which 
> language they used, what they want is to get their results as 
> fast as possible. Most of them do not write programs that are 
> to last, they are effectively throw away programs. This leads 
> them to Python (or R) and they are not really interested in 
> learning anything else.
>
> The fact that NumPy sort of sucks in terms of performance, isn't
> noticed by them
> as they get their results "fast enough" and a lot faster than
> sequential Python. The fact that if they used Chapel or even D 
> for
> their compute intensive code they would rapidly discover that 
> NumPy
> sort of sucks never really occurs to these people as they are 
> focussed
> on the results not the means of achieving them.
>
> Polyglot Python/D or Python/Chapel with Matplotlib is the way 
> to go. But that really requires a D replacement for Pandas.


Russell, thanks for your thoughts - I appreciate it.

What would a Pandas replacement look like in D?