Although I like Python (language, philosophy and culture), I am not very experienced at it (I never worked in place where it was the "official" language, so I use it mainly for small throw away stuff), I am far from being an elegant Python programmer.

Can anyone with more experience with Python (like 90% of you reading this) comment on Domain Specific Languages and Python?

Does it have any facilities that normally come bundled with functional or logic languages for the support of DSLs?

I have the feeling that that is missing from Python, but as I have seen so many wacky (read: intesting) things being made with metaclasses that I might be wrong.

Just want to point out what many static typing "bigots" are probably already thinking... declaring variables and using static type checking are, for those who like such things, much more of a productivity aid than performance optimization. They let you leverage the compiler to find bugs before your program even runs--especially the kind you are likely to introduce when refactoring (i.e., renaming a method or modifying a class hierarchy).

A better example might be how not everything in Java is a reference type (i.e. "object"); I believe the value/reference typing model was purely for performance...?

Bruce comments that Zope is faster than Apache on his machine. I'm starting to work with Plone which is a Python based Content Management System that lives on Zope. Plone's manual states that one of the performance optimizations is to place static content on Apache. I think that if Zope were truly faster than Apache that this wouldn't be a recommended performance enhancement.

Perhaps Bruce just meant the start up of the application itself rather than how it performs.

According to the professor in my university, Smalltalk is the first language introduct the concept of metaclass, which java (and many other high level language or script) is actually just borrow the idea from smalltalk, is that true?