I was pleasantly surprised to find a pointer to this article in a news digest that the ACM emails me regularly (ACM TechNews).
http://gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/28026-1.html
One thing that bugs me: the article says 3 or 4 times that Python is slow, each time with a refutation ("but it's so flexible", "but it's fast enough") but still, they sure seem to harp on the point. This is a PR issue that Python needs to fight -- any ideas?
The only thing that will fix the PR issue is to have a Python compiler distributed as part of the language. It doesn't matter if it doesn't support the full generality of Python, or even if it doesn't speed many operations up much. The only real requirements are that it can be used to produce "native" executables, and that it be an official part of the language, not a separately-distributed tool like Psyco or Pyrex. Then, it will perhaps be a sufficient "security blanket" to stop people FUDding about it.
I imagine you could speed up the Python interpreter until it's faster than half the Java JIT's out there, and people will still ask, "But can I compile to an .exe?" On the other hand, if you add a compiler, we'll see articles like the above talking about how Python can now be compiled and so therefore it's suitable for all kinds of things it wasn't before. :)
Of course, it would be *really* useful if the compiler were coupled with optional type declarations for Python-the-language, because then we could ultimately dispense with the current syntax warts of Pyrex (and the runtime/distribution warts of ctypes) for interfacing with C. But I don't think that having the compiler actually be useful is a prerequisite for solving the PR issue. :)
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