Why is Python slow?

Key Takeaways

why python is slow this is the question that comes up from people who have worked with compile languages like java and c plus sometimes people also argue javascript is an interpreter language and still it is faster than python i asked this question to one of the members of python steering council python studying council is a committee of five people who decides the future direction of python language these are the creators of python language and i will quickly summarize what we discuss in that call in this video point number one is when you are saying python is slow are you using right module and right approach for example when you are doing heavy number crunching vector and matrix operation you should be using numpy and pandas here i am going to do a quick demo of comparing numpy performance with plain python list here i have created two big list hundred thousand elements each using plain python list and i am going to now divide this to list element by element so that i get price to earning ratio this gives 8.35 millisecond performance but if you i use numpy for the same thing you see i have created numpy arrays i get 94 microsecond which means numpy is 88 times faster so when it comes to big metrics and operations and vector operations numpy and pandas perform the best and that's the reason they are used heavily in machine learning you see that using numpy speeds of the performance and if you are using python list then it was not a python's problem it was your problem you are not aware about the right approach that you should be using in your program now the reason numpy's and pandas are faster is they underneath execute in c or c plus plus so python just provides a wrapper api you make like one line call underneath you get c plus plus performance and that's the reason um python is used so much in machine learning most of the people who are doing machine learning they use python they don't know don't use javascript or they don't use c plus plus so just think about it machine learning is so much computation intensive if python was slow why would people use it for machine learning point number two is let's take about plain python so if you are writing a program in plain python of course it's gonna be slower than compile languages like java and c plus for obvious reasons python is a high level language it gives you convenience rapid prototyping so to get that benefit you have to compromise on the speed now why javascript being an interpreted language is faster because think about google chrome for example javascript is built into a browser now google as a company wants people to use google chrome so google put so much money in making javascript faster javascript is a language specification they have this um v8 engine va the google chrome runs on a v8 javascript engine which is super fast so google puts tons of money in making that faster because they want people to use google chrome so when big companies like google is putting a lot of money into some language of course you will get performance whereas python yeah people are work putting money into it but no company has a proprietary python product like like google chrome so they contribute little bit so python doesn't get as much funding as javascript having said that there are a force being made to make the plain python performance better and you can listen to that whole conversation i'm going gonna put the link of that conversation with python council member in the video description below but overall if you're using the right set of libraries like numpy's and pandas you'll probably not have complaints about speed sometimes your program is slow is slow because you are not using the right design pattern or you are using some for loop unnecessarily so whenever you you think your program is the first try to analyze if there are any design problems in your code try to fix them then try to use the right set of libraries like numpas and pandas 90 to 95 of the time you will not have a complaint that python is low i hope this video helps with your question if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you have any other question post in the comment below