Some patterns for fast Python. Know any others?

- Avoid overengineering datastructures. Tuples are better than objects (try namedtuple too though). Prefer simple fields over getter/setter functions.

- Built-in datatypes are your friends. Use more numbers, strings, tuples, lists, sets, dicts. Also check out the collections library, esp. deque.

- Be suspicious of function/method calls; creating a stack frame is expensive.

- Don't write Java (or C++, or Javascript, ...) in Python.

- Are you sure it's too slow? Profile before optimizing!

- The universal speed-up is rewriting small bits of code in C. Do this only when all else fails.