> Python 3 smokes Perl.

Are those Perl programs written to use multiple cores?

> And most people are using 2.x which is even faster.

All the 1/1 and 1 make them seem pretty much the same.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

That is not "smoking", that is "pretty much the same".

If you want to see Python being smoked: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...

That's winning at the special olympics. They are both so slow you'd never use either for cpu constrained tasks.

That is plain offensive. The special olympics are an even greater achievement of the human body as a machine, since it must push itself with far lesser degrees of freedom.

As I saw, it was not meant to be offensive. Special olympics are for special people. They are not the best among all competitors. Most interpreted languages are not comparable to compiled languages.

Neither Perl nor Python are interpreted. They are both just slow.

Why not? NumPy offloads all the heavy lifting to LAPACK and BLAS which is some of the most optimized code on the planet. Numeric work in Python is bread-and-butter for many people.

Agreed. I have a bunch of pretty CPU intensive stuff written in C that was optimized as much as I could, given the time I had to write the code.

I re-wrote the same code using python on a lark to see how bad it would be, colour me very surprised when it actually beat the original code by a considerable margin!

Perl has all these same libraries and more. We were talking about code in the actual language.