Python is Faster Than FORTRAN

Many people may think that Python is slow because it is compiled to byte code. This presentation shows that Python can be fast even for computational intensive applications. In the example presented here, Python competes with FORTRAN, a programming languages renowned for its performance and aggressively optimizing compilers.

Python offers powerful data structures such as sets that make writing efficient algorithms extremely simple. FORTRAN on the other hand, has much less in such support. For the given example, it takes considerably more programming in FORTRAN than in Python to achieve similar execution times for large data sizes. The comparison of program run times and lines of code, which can be roughly translated into development effort, shows that Python can actually be faster than FORTRAN under many circumstances typically found in real life.