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An interesting article which addresses whether having a fast programming language matters. Perhaps we could use this as a jumping off point to address the real-world capabilities and limitations of Pythonista and template as an iOS development environment.

Pushing a view controller onto a navigation controller takes the time it takes. Your text fields won’t draw their strings any faster just because you’re using Swift instead of Python.

http://inessential.com/2016/04/21/performance_these_days

As a guy who does (mainframe) Performance for a living I'd say that if a language is scripting some underlying capabilities you have to think about two things:

• The capabilities' being scripted speeds. For example Java's JNI usually is doing native stuff that might not be possible to speed up.
• The scripting language and code. So, Javascript in most browsers now has good JIT compilation etc. I've not heard of much effort to speed up Python other than PyPy. (I'd love links to discussions on how Python can be sped up.)

But then there's the algorithm. If you wrote bad code (and what is bad code might be environment-specific) you get what you deserve. :-)

The speed of Python lies mostly in development time. Python is not the fastest language execution wise, but getting something running is A LOT faster than in comparison to C or Java.

I guess the question I'm trying to understand is - does sheer execution speed actually affect real-world performance of Pythonista apps on iOS? I suppose that this depends on the structure of your code - but I wonder what the effect is if you limit your focus to native iOS UI elements being manipulated in standard ways?

🌻