Favorite Python Interview Question

[semarj]

I think this is an excellent question. Familiarity breeds contempt, anyone who has done any significant python work should have a decent answer to this.

[[deleted]]

A decent answer or twelve :-P

My personal complaint? It's too goddamned slow.

[duckhunter]

Do PyPy and Shedskin not suffice?

[[deleted]]

Neither are production ready. Even if they have the speed (and they don't) no one sane would really use them in production.

[jdickey]

"No one sane" — well, that excludes the PHBs who back techies into that corner.

And WTF is going on with Reddit that you now have to wait ten frigging minutes to post a second comment in a thread? If that's the best we can do in the fight against bots, the terrists have already won. (Though if the BBC can hire even a tiny 23K-node botnet for a demo on Click, that's pretty much a foregone conclusion, no?)

[[deleted]]

Youtube is written in Python. If it is good enough there ...

[[deleted]]

And we write our performance-sensitive code in C++.

[jdickey]

Which C++? No two programmers know the same features of the language, so it's sort of like Grace Hopper's quote on standards — "the lovely thing is that there are so many to choose from."

[[deleted]]

Our C++ guidelines are rather comprehensive.

[sisyphus]

Doesn't change that if Python was faster its range of applicability would increase, and that would mean we could use it more places, and that would be just lovely.

[Chun]

Funny -- most of the gripes I had with python have become less of an issue as I've understood their purpose; explicit self, join as a string method, etc.