It’s amazing how often the authors point of “agility” arises in real world circumstances. I’m not a programmer, but I use Python a lot in my engineering job. There have been 3 times in the past month where I got an order of magnitude speed up because SciPy implements a very complex but highly efficient algorithm which I would never have had time to deploy.
> There have been 3 times in the past month where I got an order of magnitude speed up because SciPy implements a very complex but highly efficient algorithm which I would never have had time to deploy.
Yes. I feel like the author conflates the language with the package ecosystem. Pure Python is pretty horrible for scientific computing (3*[3]=[3,3,3] is about as counterproductive to scientific computations as it gets), but Numpy changes the semantics of those operations.
In other words, Python has an absolutely stellar package ecosystem. There have been attempts to bring a package ecosystem to C, but it never took off. However, I do wonder how C would fare if it had.
this implies Python's advantages is not having a package manager, but better teachers or at least teaching better practices, so it isn't even language related.
