Yep, I know this. And, indeed, developer time counts. And also, you need not optimize everything.
I always tell a story when I hear this: I once did an exercise that a colleague gave to students myself. They were to read 2000 spam mails, identify all words, make a statistics of that, and finally test the statistics to tell spam from non-spam in a sample of another 2000 mails. That's a simple AI task. But they had to do that in Matlab. Okay, I did it pulling out all tricks of Matlab I could find in the net to get it under the required 90 seconds. Barely made it, and it took me almost a day of work. Then I repeated the same in Java, finished it with very simple code (and I mean beginner level code) in two hours, and it ran in 3.5 seconds. What has that to do with our discussion? Matlab addicts say it is a language where you easily get results without much coding, thus shorter development cycles and faster results. It is simply not true. Verbose code in C/Java/C++ does the same much faster and is easier to understand. Mainly, because you do not have to worry about tricks.
I consider Python a script language now that is used to call C code. The beginner students of mathematics should learn the basics, not the scripting language.
Another story as a side remark: I have a student right now doing some pattern matching algorithms for a thesis, and he is doing it in Python. His main complaint, however, is that his algorithms are so slow. He is optimizing every bit he finds, which is a good attitude. But maybe the language itself is holding him back.
I always tell a story when I hear this: I once did an exercise that a colleague gave to students myself. They were to read 2000 spam mails, identify all words, make a statistics of that, and finally test the statistics to tell spam from non-spam in a sample of another 2000 mails. That's a simple AI task. But they had to do that in Matlab. Okay, I did it pulling out all tricks of Matlab I could find in the net to get it under the required 90 seconds. Barely made it, and it took me almost a day of work. Then I repeated the same in Java, finished it with very simple code (and I mean beginner level code) in two hours, and it ran in 3.5 seconds. What has that to do with our discussion? Matlab addicts say it is a language where you easily get results without much coding, thus shorter development cycles and faster results. It is simply not true. Verbose code in C/Java/C++ does the same much faster and is easier to understand. Mainly, because you do not have to worry about tricks.
I consider Python a script language now that is used to call C code. The beginner students of mathematics should learn the basics, not the scripting language.
Another story as a side remark: I have a student right now doing some pattern matching algorithms for a thesis, and he is doing it in Python. His main complaint, however, is that his algorithms are so slow. He is optimizing every bit he finds, which is a good attitude. But maybe the language itself is holding him back.