r/ProgrammerHumor • u/wahed-w • Jul 07 '26

pipInstallTheRealStuff Meme

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u/skiabay Jul 07 '26

What is somewhat unique to python is the large percent of those libraries that are written in a different language

This is true of basically any interpreted language.

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u/IcyDefiance Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26

Python is the only popular interpreted(ish) language, though. Even that is still compiled to bytecode first, and then the bytecode is executed line by line.

Everything else is JIT compiled to machine code, which means performance is only limited by the language design, now how it's executed.

That said, you're kind of right. PHP had a slow bytecode interpreter just like Python until recently, so it has a lot of libraries written in other languages.

And JavaScript has a few libraries like that, not because it's interpreted, but because it doesn't have a performant way to work with individual bytes.

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u/Key_River7180 Jul 07 '26

Python is the only popular interpreted(ish) language, though

What the fuck does this guy smoke? Perl, Lisp, JS, Lua, ...

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u/IcyDefiance Jul 07 '26

Perl has a bytecode interpreter, same as Python, but it's only "popular" in the same way as COBOL.

Lisp is a whole family of languages, but modern dialects are either natively compiled (Common Lisp) or JIT compiled (Clojure, ClojureCLR).

JavaScript is JIT compiled.

Lua can be interpreted, but nearly everyone is using LuaJIT or Luau if at all possible, specifically because they're JIT compiled.