Silverware wrote:
Work fine, does not mean work fast
I can do the same numerical work in C or C++ much faster.
(or in JS at about the same speed, only with more work involved due to Py having the nice SciPy libs)
Python is great for the general use-case of calculating random shit. But it is not a speed demon, and is best used for one-off calculations, rather than trying to get thousands of calculations per second.
Yes, and I believe OpenStack is also compiled Python
C(++) might be faster at runtime, but Python is faster when you're writing it, especially since it has such a generous standard library. In terms of data mining or computational linguistics processing, Python is actually a preferred language since string manipulation is so easy, and many array/string operations that would require an explicit for-loop or function call in C-like languages can be done with a simple slice operation in Python. Underlyingly the procedure is the same, but it's at a higher level of abstraction for the programmer.
Python's standard library for mathematical operations is also generous, which makes it useful for statistical calculations. Application programming is not its strong suit, but can be a far more powerful parsing engine than C++ could ever hope to be with its standard library.
Slower runtime speed is the nature of most interpreted languages, but Python can be compiled to runnable bytecode for some performance gains. If I recall correctly, its memory management scheme actually beats Java's in some respects. Of course, there are variants of Python that are designed to be compiled rather than interpreted, or interpreted using a different implementation language as the foundation for the interpreter.
Python is also starting to encroach upon JavaScript and PHP's territory as web programming languages,
serving as part of the back-end structures of Google, Facebook, and Youtube.
It's often used as a glue language between services written in other languages, particularly C, since there's a library that allows Python to call C functions (or something to that effect).
EDIT: It does not surprise me that Yahoo has a JavaScript frontend and a JavaScript & PHP backend. This is obviously one of the contributing factors to Google being so kickass, and Yahoo being so lame.