Are those million lines of code in one module? Is the nesting depth greater than 8? Those are indications of poor code organization regardless of language or block style. If your modules are not too big and code is not too deeply nested, the way the language indicates block structure has little interaction with the overall size of the project. I read and write Python code written by me and others all day long and almost never encounter bugs resulting from white space.

You need something to check for bad names and syntax errors. It doesn't have to be a compiler or interpreter. I run several static code checkers constantly via my editor so I can immediately see if I misspelled a variable name or left off a closing paren or something. If you would run a compiler to check static correctness of C or Java, why not run a checker on Python? There are several commonly used checkers. Here's a discussion comparing their relative merits.

You're absolutely correct that whether a language implementation is "fast enough" depends totally on the problem being solved. If the program is I/O bound, as most are, Python and many other languages are fast enough. Even if part of the problem is CPU bound, there is usually a lot of code that is not, which is why hybrid C/Python solutions are so common. For example, NumPy can take advantage of multiple CPUs when doing matrix calculations, allowing one do heavy, fast number crunching without writing a line of C.

If you need to do CPU-bound processing in Python code, threads won't help if you're using CPython, but they might if you're using Jython which is JVM implementation that has no GIL. Alternatively, you can use the multiprocessing module which avoids the GIL and a lot of other potential problems with threads at the cost of having to explicitly communicate between processes rather than share data structures directly.

Validation of inputs is always a good idea. It's also a lot easier in a language with real strings and automatic memory management than in C.

While I do use Python every day and like it, the fact that lots of people use it is not a good argument for it being a good language. In particular, PHP and C++ are the best counter-examples I know: they should never have existed but are extremely popular. C is a good language because it does what it was designed to do well, which was to give programmers direct access to hardware in a structured way. It is often misused for things that do not need low level hardware access. C++ was not a good language because it started from C's limitations as a low level, hardware-oriented language and tried to make it into a general purpose application language.

I've heard some silly arguments against languages, but complaining about the content of a third-party's books really takes the cake. I suppose you'd rather they used dry, forgettable examples to be considered a "serious" language. BTW, you may be unaware that Guido himself is the origin of the Monty Python references, which include the name itself obviously. I learned Python using the official docs and there are many other alternatives to O'Reilly so if the genius of Monty Python offends you, it will not be forced on you.

There are certainly plenty of things that could be better about Python, but you're going to need to be a lot more specific with your rants. What is not decent about psycopg2? What libraries are "half-baked" and why? What exactly is a fiasco about Python 3? If you do a lot of reinventing of the wheel, you may not have encountered the extensive standard library or abundance of good libraries at PyPi.

mod_wsgi can be easier to configure than a FastCGI setup. It supports both in-process and out-of-process modes. The former is more like mod_python and the latter is more like FastCGI. That said, the apps I work on run themselves and are accessed via mod_fcgid which is good for the custom control we need.

To be able to take advantage of the additional transistors provided by Moore's "law," either clock speed must increase or more work must be accomplished in a single clock cycle. It is getting very difficult to increase either of those within a single core. Therefore, the gains must come from additional cores.

Thank you Spiridios for expanding on my post. I thought it was quite clear that the gains referred to result from Moore's "law" rather than being the "law" itself.

Developing software is all about managing complexity. Abstractions are the primary tool used to do so. They are neither inherently good or bad. A large part of writing good software is finding the appropriate abstractions and eliminating inappropriate ones. If an abstraction allows a program to be written more easily with an acceptible level of performance and correctness, it is an appropriate abstraction.

To know what code is "actually doing" is relative. No programmer knows what his code is doing at the level of gates on the chip. It's rarely necessary or even helpful to know what the code is doing at the level of CPU instructions or microinstructions. This is especially true if the code runs on multiple CPUs.

Try reading the headline again. Usually, clueless posters have to be reminded to read TFA, but this is ridiculous. As Moore's "law" continues to be mostly true, the added transistors are being used for extra more cores rather than to make one core faster. Most of the cores sit idle most of the time because few programs can use more than one of them at once.

If it works as well as claimed, it is indeed awesome. However, my enthusiasm is muted by the fact that it's needed in the first place. There is no end in sight to the conflict between Israelis, Palestinians and everyone else in the region and plenty of blame to go around.

No, because there aren't any ballistic missiles being fired at the Gaza strip.

Who said anything about the FBI? TFA was about the Library of Congress and United States Copyright office, neither of which makes ultimate decisions about whether anything I do is illegal. I'm certainly glad that the FBI generally has better things to do than knock down my door because I buy DVDs and play them with an unauthorized player. It should be obvious to everyone that not only is the law completely unreasonable on that issue, but that enforcing it is completely impractical. The issue is not that watching a DVD using libdvdcss is illegal (it is illegal because Congress passed a law saying it is) but that it is a bad law which should be invalidated.