Comment by dingo_bat
8 years ago
> I think wanting Python to be a bit faster is similar to wanting Haskell to have a little bit of mutability
I'm sorry but that makes zero sense. Haskell is defined by immutability. People want to use haskell because of that characteristic. I don't want to use python because it is slow.
Sorry I disagree. There is definitely a sense in which Haskell is desirable because it is immutable, e.g. I myself love immutable data structures, it certainly makes it desirable. But my point is that it puts a restriction. Now you cannot implement algorithms that need mutability such as hash maps. It is easy to circumvent such problems but one other way is basically introducing mutability to Haskell which totally doesn't make sense. I think same goes for python, if you want to make it significantly faster then you need to face certain trade-offs: maybe data model should be optimized, or maybe `int` shouldn't be arbitrary precision integers, or maybe there should be primitive types like `int`, `double` as in Java to increase performance. Truth is these are not Pythonic solutions, and just like mutability is not Haskell-esque, optimizing Python sacrifising these trade-offs is not Pythonic.
> one other way is basically introducing mutability to Haskell which totally doesn't make sense
It makes perfect sense, because Haskell is not "an immutable language". It's a language in which some things are immutable, and those that are not are explicitly indicated in the type system.