Most recent update: 7th November 2024 - 06:03:28
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Python as Glue: Programing Language and Sticky Ecosystem
- Python is the magical glue programming language I've been happy with my entire life
- Low cognitive overhead, rich ecosystem, excellent interoperability, fast development, strong standard library
- Minimal lines of code to get a task done that can be done without a single lookup for most tasks (internal knowledge for syntax and base libraries)
- Most of those lines are high efficiency especially if it's on a common path
- For the uncommon paths that become common it's a structural fault to have it slow because ...
- Python is an ecosystem that agglomerates high efficiency libraries together (glue programming language)
numpy,pandas,pytorch,tensorflow,scikit-learn, ...- Even if not everything is exposed to Python it's usually a Pareto optimal selection of the 20% of the API that covers 80% of the tasks
- Reminded, starkly, of this when writing a tutorial for Rust code and writing a Python implementation
- The example task was "too simple" in that it fell within Python's hot path (file I/O, decompression, JSON, HTTP requests, ...) and hence was only a tad less efficient than Rust
- Glue language and passing over to the fast custom language for the compute heavy core task is a winning strategy
- Perhaps reframe as "Reach for Rust less when you're playing with glue"
- Python is the optimal glue language, very much meant to have things glued into it, and Rust is the optimal fast language that's made to be glued in
- Almost all of my large scale work has been Python first, efficiency when needed, and Python gets you most of the way most of the time
- Python's "slow" reputation misses the point
- Glue languages are also likely the optimal target for LLMs