Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 11:44:17PM -0000, Richard Higginbotham wrote: > > Let me expand on the reasons for my post here. It > > seems like > > motivation has turned into a bit of a bike-shead. > > I don't think that anyone is questioning your motivation. (Although one > of your recent replies to Andrew seems to be casting some pretty > mean-spirited aspersions on his motivation: "[Andrew] would go through > any hurdle to thwart a consideration of my proposal". > And honestly, your personal motivation isn't really important. If you > are doing it for the fame and money, you'll probably be disappointed. If > you are doing it to give back to the Python community, that's great, but > the community and the core devs have no obligation to accept it into the > standard library. You can always put it on PyPI, you don't need to ask > anyone's permission, just go ahead and do it. > The core devs have a duty to curate the standard library. They cannot > accept everything proposed, regardless of the author's feelings or > motivations or how useful it is to them. Also their own personal selfish > motivation that they are over-worked and under-appreciated as it is > without taking on the burden of yet another library to maintain if it > isn't justified. > Part of the process for justifying that library or set of algorithms is > to run the gauntlet of Python-Ideas, and for good or ill, most of the > people here tend to be pretty conservative in technology matters, > possibly even more conservative than the core-devs. The people here on > Python-Ideas are a subset of the Python community, if you can't convince > us that your idea is good, you probably aren't going to get much > interest from the rest of the community either. > Don't take it personally, it's just the nature of the Python community. > If you want a community more open to change, you might consider the > Node.js or PHP communities, or so I'm lead to believe. > [...] > > It used to require > > containers with 100k or more elements to see a speed improvement over > > some other unnamed methods. These days its closer to 50 million with > > the only other contender being set (hash based) operations at least > > that I know of. > > Am I misunderstanding you? You seem to be saying that your algorithm has > become slower. > In the past, your algorithm beat other unnamed algorithms for moderate > sized lists of 100K elements, but now your algorithm doesn't beat them > unless the lists are large, 50 million elements or so. So in relative > terms, you seem to be saying that your algorithm is now 500 times slower > relative to alternatives than it used to be. > I don't think that's what you mean, so can you clarify? Computers have gotten faster over 20 years, especially the ones I can afford. At the same time what was a C extension is now a pure python library. At some point a bubble sort will be just as fast a a merge sort from years ago.
> > I think there is a reasonable chance that if it were > > > > converted to C it would be comparable to if not better than the Set > > operations for people who wanted lists for what ever reason, even with > > much smaller data sets. > > Possibly. As we have seen from this thread, the benefits of locality can > sometimes make up for a less sophisticated algorithm. If I've learned > anything from this thread, it is that relying on Big Oh to predict > performance is even less useful today than it used to be. O( ) from theory is less useful. Looking at the rate of change in data sets is more predictive though. > [...] > > I'm most concerned with > > getting feedback from the list to determine if it would fit any other > > use cases. If there is some kind of need for it as a general function. > > You're on the wrong forum for those questions. > Here, we are most concerned with whether or not the proposal is a good > fit for the language and stdlib, and the person making the proposal is > expected to have done their homework and determined other use-cases > first, or at least as part of the process. > If you want to maximise the number of people seeing your proposal, > which will in turn increase your chances of getting feedback of > potential use-cases, you might try posting it on somewhere like > Reddit first. I don't think there are many people who would necessarily benefit now that we have discussed it, it requires large data sets to be differential to other methods. The most useful aspect is probably to show that tailored algorithms are still very beneficial if time consuming, at least for large data sets. That and anyone with serious performance needs should be using C as has always been true. _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/HG2BZDFYEXIYXLDDJIOIQ46RV6ZN3XJD/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
