Racket seems to be really neat with support for features like JIT and futures (which have been around before 5.1).
The other day I tried a simple benchmark (nothing elaborate - just fib) and found it to be significantly faster than Python. Unfortunately I don't have the numbers right now.
Does anyone have any experience to share regarding the use of Racket in a production app?
I have to agree. I don't really mind seeing articles like this on HN sometimes and I confess I submit some articles like this at times. The discussion here is what I am really interested in.
I tried Perl and moved to Python. With Ruby, I really like what I see. Unfortunately, I have spent quite a bit of time with Python and know it too well to want to move.
Python and Ruby are more similar than they are different. They're like 2 chocolate bars hanging out in the store, sure one has peanuts and the other has caramel but at the end of the day they're both chocolate bars.
If you're happy with Python stick with it. They're both good languages.
I cannot agree with this more! I'm constantly suprised by the amount of Ruby vs Python arguments I see. There's only about 3 or 4 actual differences between the two.
(I started to list them, then realised I'd have to do more research to explain properly - and left it for now.)
Perl can definitely be more compact than Python for regex and parsing but I am surprised that he need to move from Ruby to Perl. Ruby borrows much of the regex and quote syntax from Perl.
As someone who doesn't know much about MailChimp, the original question seems valid. A little more detailed answer (like the one by qeorge) would have helped me understand this better.
As you work at MailChimp, it would have helped if you would have given that detail.
Ben from MailChimp here. We invested a lot in abuse prevention, well before introducing any freemium plans. The problem ESPs like us face isn't so much the "evil" spam, but the "fuzzy" spam (from clueless marketers).
Probably shoulda brought that up in my blog post (it's usually the first question techies ask), but it's something our customers are pretty familiar with, so I left it out.
Perl 5 is quite an amazing language once you get used to the syntax and begin to grok it. I say this as a Python programmer who has only recently begun to seriously learn Perl as my day job demands it. Earlier, I had used Perl only off and on for small scripts. I was always put off by Perl syntax and contexts. However, once I got over that and started using it seriously, it does have a lot of neat features.
One example, I recently got to know about attributes[1] (which probably people using Perl for some time may know already) and its neat uses. I can use attributes to do what I would do with a Python decorator[2]. IIUC, this feature has been in Perl since 5.6 (2003). Yes, I still like Python and I continue to believe that its easier to write bad code in Perl than in Python but I have a lot more respect, liking and understanding of Perl than I did a month ago. IMO Perl 5 is well positioned for meeting enterprise needs as it stands today. I understand this now after I spend the last 3 months debating and discussing with the architecture board of my employer to introduce Python as an officially approved language for our IT applications (I work for a large corporation so we have a lot of policies ;)).
As a language, I like Perl 6 even more based on what I have read[3]. I hope to spend some time playing with Rakudo sometime soon and eagerly await a production ready package.
cx_Oracle is py3k compatible. I'm really confident we'll have Django running on py3k by the end of the summer, hopefully I'll have something exciting to announce about this coming up, but if not I'll just dedicate my summer to it.
They currently are compatible back to 2.4. They want to drop one Python release per Django release (1.3 will support 2.5 and up, 1.4 will support 2.6 and up). 2.6 is the cutoff when syntax will work everywhere.
How are they dealing with Google AppEngine's support for 2.5 when Django reaches 1.4? Or is AppEngine also expected to upgrade to 2.6 (or higher) anytime soon?
They still maintain the old versions too. Last security update featured new point releases of 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 beta. So you can just use the old version until Google get their act together.
Technically, Django doesn't run on GAE. All the options to get it running on GAE involve quite a bit of hacking of Django. So there really isn't any support to maintain.
(what, people don't like a joke? I happen to know the rough timeline; when it becomes a specific timeline sometime in the very near future -- probably around the time we release 1.3 -- y'all will know about it too)
