Sounds really cool! As someone who programs a bit for work to help with automating processes and fun, but is not a computer scientist I'm a little jealous of never having taken a true database, compilers, PLT, or theory of computation course.
It sounds like you and your classmates are top notch and will go on to some pretty freaking cool careers (ex: I'd work at Jane Street if I was not a parent and a lot smarter :)). Out of curiosity, what are the typical places your classmates go upon graduation?
Yep, the takeaway for me was that the Python project required far less code, but we're not sure how fast it ran. Further below, the author states the inputs were so small it didn't matter. What if it did? Would the Python solution still be viable?
0.5x with metaprogramming vs 0.7x without in Scala, isn't "far less". This also matches my experience - Scala is pretty on par with Python in terms of code length. It gets a tiny hit from being statically typed, but then makes up for it by having richer stdlib and powerful type-level abstractions.
Python was already in the top 5 well before the whole AI craze and before pandas was out.
Python has a huge amount of introductory learning material that assumes it is your first language, while most FP languages (Ex: Clojure, Haskell, F#, Scala, OCaml) really struggle in this area. I really like FP, but there is a bit of a steep plateau when learning. If you look at some of the questions people ask in the Python stack exchange, you get the impression that millions are learning it as the defacto first language (I was one of those nearly a decade ago). I try to find similar paths to FP and everything from the tooling to lack of thorough introductory material keeps killing it for me.
Another issue is that from a pedagogy perspective all the "building blocks" in FP are different to what many people already know. If you're used to the imperative/OO paradigm you can move between languages by just learning the syntax to (lists, dictionaries, while and for loops, branching, array access, file IO, and classes). When learning FP you have to learn similar, but different concepts (pattern matching, monads, currying, discriminated unions...etc).
The beginner books that do exist (ex: learn you a Haskell) are nice, but I've talked to many (myself included) that when they finish say "I still have no clue how to program in Haskell". To give another example, I spent two weeks reading a Python book on building text games and when I was finished I was like "OMG I can do stuff". That book covered how all the main data structures could be used with short and fun programs. It also included reading text files, string operations, pickling data, classes, modules..use of the included IDLE IDE. It was great.
> Python has a huge amount of introductory learning material that assumes it is your first language, while most FP languages (Ex: Clojure, Haskell, F#, Scala, OCaml) really struggle in this area
I don't know how long ago have you tried Clojure, but it is a lot easier to start with than Haskell or Scala. There are now more than a dozen of books available (for the beginner and for the advanced levels). Clojure is much better than Python - it has extremely nice, consistent standard library; It has "true" REPL - with it you can evaluate almost any chunk of your code with no preliminary ritual, even much praised Jupyter doesn't feel as nice; Clojure not statically typed but it has Spec, which is totally awesome - the way how you can derive property based tests is almost mind-blowing; Clojure's stability is almost legendary; It makes concurrency simple; It makes dealing with dependencies less painful;
It can seamlessly run on both: front-end and back-end, having live-updates in your browser and REPL connected to it feels like magic. Honestly, transforming data using Clojure is a pure joy.
I have a few Clojure books, but not knowing Java and the JVM very well and then having to learn Emacs/Cider and all the other tools really kind of killed it for me. In short, some of the Clojure REPL advantages are better than Python, but not by enough to justify learning the ecosystem.
I might try again later. I have "Clojure for the Brave and True", Carin Meiyer's book, and one of Fogus' books.
I really want to learn Clojure, but just need to sit down and put the time in. It's also discouraging to see people comment about some of these languages (Clojure and F#) as being on life support.
I can't say anything about F#, but Clojure is doing quite alright. It gathers more conferences and meetups around the world (more than Haskell, OCaml, F#, Elm or Elixir). Has more podcasts (defn, the REPl, Clojurescript podcast, Apropos, Cognicast), there are other podcasts created and run by people actively using Clojure, where they talk not only about Clojure. Clojurians Slack and clojureverse.org are very active. New libraries and books coming out regularly. My company recently was hiring and I shout out on Twitter and I got DM request from all over the world: Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, India, Bangladesh, Jordan, Poland, Latvia, Ukraine, Russia, UK, Germany, US and other countries, people want to write Clojure full-time. So, yeah. I don't know where you read that Clojure is dying or whatever. It is not as big as Python or Javascript, but it's slowly, steadily growing.
I was always taught that one of the main reason to use multiple conductors was due to reduce the losses caused by the corona effect of ionizing the air.
As another commenter says, bending might also be a factor.
Most of my background is in Python, but I've dabbled in a lot of languages out there from Haskell, lisp, Perl...etc. The point being I don't mind trying new things. I don't know Java and the JVM very well though and a lot of hosted languages like Scala, Clojure, Kotlin...etc seem to assume that you're intimately familiar with it which is a pain. Also, the Scala tooling when I last checked ~2 years ago was complex. I just wanted to write a simple app and started drowning in the complexity of SBT and gave up pretty quick. Your mileage may vary, especially if you're already familiar with the Java ecosystem. I've had more success with F# and OCaml.
Note that I'm not saying Scala is bad, it just wasn't an easy enough transition for me to justify climbing the plateau. Clojure ended up being a similar situation. These languages are also optimized around writing large software projects and that was a hindrance rather than a benefit to someone that does more scripting than anything.
It sounds like you and your classmates are top notch and will go on to some pretty freaking cool careers (ex: I'd work at Jane Street if I was not a parent and a lot smarter :)). Out of curiosity, what are the typical places your classmates go upon graduation?