Quote from dcraig:
In descending order of speed:
C
C++
C#/Java
Python
Of course if it's 'fast enough' the question is irrelevant.
True Craig, you rightly added: "Of course if it's 'fast enough' the question is irrelevant". The above enumeration is absolutely misleading for a newbie, like the many who seem to visit this thread.
If you program a "Hello World" thingie from a to z, the above enumeration could be correct.
Any substantial program is a highly complex entity. The skill - or lack of skill - of the programmer plays an important role. It is easy to write some code in C being 100 times slower than Python if you are sufficiently dumb (programming-wise).
More serious. For normal applications, a language like Python falls back on libraries - modules - which are highly optimized C and difficult to improve by even star programmers. Very extensive, nay unique, scientific libraries are available when needed. In a sense, Python only comes in to stitch or glue together this high-performance code. Many popular comparisons are totally out of whack from this viewpoint.
The art of programming in Python is to use it where it is really needed: to relieve the programmer of useless toil and hence, dramatically eliminate error and reduce development time. Factors of 10 or better have been advanced. Whenever performance issues arise, they do with any sophisticated application, it's up to the programmer to do something about it. Given the flexibility of Python, this is usually not a big problem. If need be, simply program a few lines in C, that's often all it takes. Don't forget, C and Python are kind of one internally.
Myself, although I may 'modesty' call myself a virtuoso C/C++ programmer, I very, very rarely had to do this since I work with Python.
Interesting is also the development work going on in Python. The Python picked up by M$, 'Ironpython' is kind of an example of this, albeit kind of scrapped by the python crowd a year ago. In the meantime, several optimizers are readily available yielding truly effortlessly speedups of 3 to 4 times. A hot project is PyPy which is going to be a true revolution in the art of programming languages. Some say, it will be a Python performing as C itself! Part of it seems to exist as alpha.
Furthermore Bjarn Stroustrup, the developer of C++ is working on a successor to C++ with, if I'm not mistaken, quite some Python things in it.
nononsense