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Comment by DNF2 | Hacker News Reader

I beg your pardon? Knowing that Python is slow is a strength of Python? Then, if Python suddenly became fast, it would be a negative?

Did I misunderstand something?

Presumably, all fast languages are at a disadvantage, then.

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I never called it a strength; I simply don't care how fast Python is because I don't need to. Reasoning about what is going on under the hood with Python is just easier than Julia - if it needs to be fast, it's a fast external library being used.

This is really a minor issue stemming from the relative maturity of the languages - if Julia becomes more established I would hope usage of external libraries which don't offer a performance advantage (ie everything besides C and Fortran) eventually gets replaced with native packages to preserve the sanity of the users.

So then that 'weakness' in python is not an issue to you personally, because you fluently drop down to a fast language anytime you need to, with no particular loss in productivity?

Keep in mind though, that this could be a hurdle to those who are less multilingual. So even though it's not a weakness to everyone, it is to many.

One problem relying on fast libraries causes is it makes doing compiler tricks like automatic differentiation (AD) basically impossible. Also, it restricts the types of APIs that make sense. A simple example of this is to compare Scikit learn to Julia. In Scikit learn, most clustering methods don't allow the user to specify a distance function because doing so would require running python inside a tight C loop, tanking performance. In MLJ, on the other hand, basically anything that requires a distance function will allow you to pass one in rather than assuming euclidean distance. This is possible, because a distance function written in Julia can still be fast, so it can be used without slowing down the whole program for people who only want euclidean distances.

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