Quote Originally Posted by Terrance View Post
Also, with built in numpy support, it's almost like a faster free version of matlab.
MATLAB is many times faster than the default Python dist. PyPy etc. would probably be comparable, since both MATLAB and PyPy are JIT. (also JIT) Julia is apparently the faster free version of MATLAB, but I've always shied away from it because every time I test it out, it fails.

----

Agree that Java is this century's COBOL...

----

Python is popular because it basically has everything you need OOTB. And it's multi-paradigm. And it's plenty fast compared to compiled languages except for I/O-intensive applications. Even so, there are so many projects to either make it AOT or JIT, making it way faster. It's biggest drawback is the whole version 2 vs 3 thing. Version 2 is finally reaching EOF (ha-ha), and a ton of stuff is written for 2.