FIOC

So I was thinking about picking up some toy-language some day. I'm used to the real stuff (think C and friends), and the non-practical stuff (like LISP/SICP, although I'm certainly no expert on that - hard to become one, since you can't do anything useful), but I can see how these scripting-language-in-asteroids things can be attractive.

So, since Python 3 was released recently, I took a look.

What the fuck, man? This isn't "revolutionary" at all, it's a 10-times-slower C with a arguably prettier syntax.

It's missing CRITICAL features like coroutines (when you have a fork called "stackless Python", you know you're in trouble). Threading is pure shit - the GLOBAL INTERPRETER LOCK literally ruins any of the language's future prospects.

They first think I take a look at, basic types, starts showing serious trouble. And I quote:

     Floating point numbers are implemented using double
     in C—all bets on their precision are off unless you
     happen to know the machine you are working with.

That's great. An interpreted non-deterministic language. And even though it doesn't offer anything resembling a guarantee about the results of a FP computation, it goes ahead and picks up the slow type, just in case it ran too fast otherwise.

Immediately below I see:

     pow(x, y)   x to the power y
     x ** y      x to the power y

Oh, I see. This must be a great example of that "there should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it ".

The sad thing is that I'm starting to fear it's amongst the best toy-but-remotely-useful languages.

You stupid fucks. If you really need that kind of speed you don't use scripting languages in the first place. If you're absolutely sure you need to, you rewrite the speed-critical portions of your application in a lower level language and integrate it with the rest of your app, the majority of which is a higher level language. You use the right tool for the job.  This has been common knowledge amongst engineers and programmers for decades that shouldn't even need to be stated. What the fuck did that unquestionable guru say about premature optimization being the root of all evil? I believe it was Knuth.
Having said that, integrating Python and C is a pain in the ass in comparison to say, Lua and C.