Ever since Ada Lovelace, a polymath often considered the first computer programmer, proposed in 1843 using holes punched into cards to solve mathematical equations on a never-built mechanical computer ...

Python -O won’t magically make every script faster, but in the right workloads it’s a free win—here’s how to test it safely.

As Python’s popularity rises, its limitations are becoming more clear. For one thing, it can be very hard to write a Python application and distribute it to people who don’t have Python installed. The ...