On Wednesday, July 23, 2014 12:49:28 PM UTC-5, Stefan Karpinski wrote: > > I definitely agree that the current status is suboptimal. Lord only knows > I've spent a lot of time thinking about ways to fix the slow global scope > issue. Many but by no means all of these thoughts are in the issues Jacob > linked to. If we figure out a solution that seems to be the right way to do > it, it will be a really good day. Until then, it seems to me that the point > of view that it's a bad thing to get a 32x speedup with very little effort > or change is a lousy way to look at things. A lot of effort has been put > into allowing that 32x speedup. Not coincidentally, 32x is about how much > slower Python is for this kind of code; Matlab, R and Octave are slower. >
I suspect some of the reaction amounts to what appears to be performance instability--if small changes can have such large effects, and you don't yet understand why, it can be unsettling because it feels like you're on a knife edge you could fall off of at any moment with one errant keystroke. And you don't know what keystroke that is. A value of developing tools like Lint and TypeCheck are that they can help make the effects of these "small changes" more transparent.