I agree... I just wish Python's performance was closer to C++s. I use Python everyday for data analysis, etc... but I'm pretty much stuck with C++ for numerical simulations. Hopefully, the gap will become manageably small sometime soon.
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I used to wish the same until I became a C# fan. If you'll ignore for a moment it's platform-specificness, it's a great compromise between Python (w/ regards to ease of use and productivity) and C++ (in terms of performance and some other things).
the good news is that it's easy to write extension modules for python when you need performance.
The bad news is, soon enough you'll realize that your entire codebase has been switched over to the extensions and Python isn't really doing anything anymore :)
People used to say something similar in games: 'Why write in C when you know you are going to have to move to asm anyway, just write it all in asm!'.
I've never seen more then 5% of c code usefully move to asm and I've never seen more then a few % of python code usefully move to a module. I am not saying it's always of waste of time it's just I haven't seen it.
What kind of applications do you have experience developing?
Mainly in and around video games on PC/PS2/XBox/PS1. C/C++/ASM for the runtime (sometimes with python for scripting) and Python for level editing and build processes.
I'm not discounting python inadequacies esp when churning vast amounts of data. Video game levels are large and python was too slow to process collision maps, shadow maps etc but we added C modules to do the heavy work and it wasn't a lot of code to write in C (it was a pita to debug them though).
PS I don't work in video games any more so I've not experienced the delights of the PS3/XBox2 first hand. I do websites now... it's a lot easier :)