[xaitv]

There's also the argument that at a certain scale the time of a developer is simply more expensive than time on a server.

If I write something in C++ that does a task in 1 second and it takes me 2 days to write, and I write the same thing in Python that takes 2 seconds but I can write it in 1 day, the 1 day of extra dev time might just pay for throwing a more high performance server against it and calling it a day. And then I don't even take the fact that a lot of applications are mostly waiting for database queries into consideration, nor maintainability of the code and the fact that high performance servers get cheaper over time.

If you work at some big corp where this would mean thousands of high performance servers that's simply not worth it, but in small/medium sized companies it usually is.

[dagw]

Realistically something that takes 1 second in C++ will take 10 seconds (if you write efficient python and lean heavily on fast libraries) to 10 minutes in python. But the rest of your point stands

[giantrobot]

I spend most of my time waiting on IO, something like C++ isn't going to improve my performance much. If C++ takes 1ms to transform data and my Python code takes 10ms, it's not much of a win for me when I'm waiting 100ms for IO.

With Python I can write and test on a Mac or Windows and easily deploy on Linux. I can iterate quickly and if I really need "performance" I can throw bigger or more VPSes at the problem with little extra cognitive load.

I do not have anywhere near the same flexibility and low cognitive load with C++. The better performance is nice but for almost everything I do day to day completely unnecessary and not worth the effort. My case isn't all cases, C++ (or whatever compiled language you pick) will be a win for some people but not for me.

[Gasp0de]

And how much code is generally written that actually is compute heavy? All the code I've ever written in my job is putting and retrieving data in databases and doing some basic calculations or decisions based on it.

[joenot443]

Damn! Is the rule of thumb really a 10x performance hit between Python/C++? I don’t doubt you’re correct, I’m just thinking of all the unnecessary cycles I put my poor CPU through.

[bombolo]

If the 1 second is spent waiting for IO, it will take 1 second in whatever language.

But yes python is slow.

However I've seen good python code be faster than bad C code.

[roflyear]

Not for everything. There are plenty of Python operations that are not 10x slower than c.

[eska]

If Python was merely twice as slow then I could agree with you.

[bombolo]

Not all code needs to process terabytes of data.

I have code running that reads ~20 bytes, checks the internal status on an hashmap and flips a bit.

Would it be faster in C? Of course.

Would it have taken me much longer to write to achieve absolutely no benefit? Yes.

[mharig]

Speeding up the time critical parts with Cython or Numba or ... is rather easy.