Guido van Rossum

we focused on a few areas where we still felt there was low-hanging fruit.

The biggest one is actually the interpreter itself.

And this has to do with details of how Python is defined.

So I don't know if the fisherman is going to follow this story.

He already jumped off the boat.

He's bored.

This is stupid.

Python is actually, even though it's always called an interpreted language, there's also a compiler in there.

It just doesn't compile to machine code.

It compiles to bytecode, which is...

sort of code for an imaginary computer that is called the Python interpreter.

It is the code that is digested by the interpreter.

That's the compiler.

We tweaked very minor bits of the compiler.

Almost all the work was done in the interpreter because

When you have a program, you compile it once, and then you run the code a whole bunch of times.

Or maybe there's one function in the code that gets run many times.

Now, I know that people who know this field are expecting me to at some point say, we built a just-in-time compiler.

Actually, we didn't.

We just made the interpreter a little more efficient.