Comment by cyberax
18 hours ago
Operator overloading is a non-issue, it's just another form of method calls.
JavaScript also has monkey-patching, and it's also very common. E.g. SolidJS replaces objects with dependency-tracking proxies.
There are really no fundamental language reasons why Python should be more complex. From what I heard from a JIT developer, the main issue is not the code itself but the module system and code loading.
JavaScript was designed from the start to operate inside a sealed environment with only few external handles, with the code loaded upfront or added on-demand via "eval". Not so for Python, where native code modules can (and will) result in code loaded dynamically and it's hard to track what depends on what.
See Self and Smalltalk for such kind of highly dynamic environment with code being loaded, and completely changing the running image on the fly.
Yet both languages are on the genesis of modern JIT compilers, going beyond what was already being done for Lisps, Prolog, BASIC.
> JavaScript also has monkey-patching, and it's also very common. E.g. SolidJS replaces objects with dependency-tracking proxies.
And the proxies make it slow as Python. Plain objects cannot suddenly become proxies, so the runtime can treat them as a special case.