You can add the "default" parameter to json.dumps to handle this:

date_handler = lambda obj: (
    obj.isoformat()
    if isinstance(obj, (datetime.datetime, datetime.date))
    else None
)
json.dumps(datetime.datetime.now(), default=date_handler)
""2010-04-20T20:08:21.634121""

Which is ISO 8601 format.

A more comprehensive default handler function:

def handler(obj):
    if hasattr(obj, "isoformat"):
        return obj.isoformat()
    elif isinstance(obj, ...):
        return ...
    else:
        raise TypeError, "Object of type %s with value of %s is not JSON serializable" % (type(obj), repr(obj))

Update: Added output of type as well as value.
Update: Also handle date

What blocks Ruby, Python to get Javascript V8 speed?

Nothing.

Well, okay: money. (And time, people, resources, but if you have money, you can buy those.)

V8 has a team of brilliant, highly-specialized, highly-experienced (and thus highly-paid) engineers working on it, that have decades of experience (I"m talking individually – collectively it"s more like centuries) in creating high-performance execution engines for dynamic OO languages. They are basically the same people who also created the Sun HotSpot JVM (among many others).

Lars Bak, the lead developer, has been literally working on VMs for 25 years (and all of those VMs have lead up to V8), which is basically his entire (professional) life. Some of the people writing Ruby VMs aren"t even 25 years old.

Are there any Ruby / Python features that are blocking implementation of optimizations (e.g. inline caching) V8 engine has?

Given that at least IronRuby, JRuby, MagLev, MacRuby and Rubinius have either monomorphic (IronRuby) or polymorphic inline caching, the answer is obviously no.

Modern Ruby implementations already do a great deal of optimizations. For example, for certain operations, Rubinius"s Hash class is faster than YARV"s. Now, this doesn"t sound terribly exciting until you realize that Rubinius"s Hash class is implemented in 100% pure Ruby, while YARV"s is implemented in 100% hand-optimized C.

So, at least in some cases, Rubinius can generate better code than GCC!

Or this is rather matter of resources put into the V8 project by Google.

Yes. Not just Google. The lineage of V8"s source code is 25 years old now. The people who are working on V8 also created the Self VM (to this day one of the fastest dynamic OO language execution engines ever created), the Animorphic Smalltalk VM (to this day one of the fastest Smalltalk execution engines ever created), the HotSpot JVM (the fastest JVM ever created, probably the fastest VM period) and OOVM (one of the most efficient Smalltalk VMs ever created).

In fact, Lars Bak, the lead developer of V8, worked on every single one of those, plus a few others.

The {{variable}} is substituted directly into the HTML. Do a view source; it isn"t a "variable" or anything like it. It"s just rendered text.

Having said that, you can put this kind of substitution into your JavaScript.

<script type="text/javascript"> 
   var a = "{{someDjangoVariable}}";
</script>

This gives you "dynamic" javascript.

You can list all the available timezones with pytz.all_timezones:

In [40]: import pytz
In [41]: pytz.all_timezones
Out[42]: 
["Africa/Abidjan",
 "Africa/Accra",
 "Africa/Addis_Ababa",
 ...]

There is also pytz.common_timezones:

In [45]: len(pytz.common_timezones)
Out[45]: 403

In [46]: len(pytz.all_timezones)
Out[46]: 563

I recommend using python-dateutil. Its parser has been able to parse every date format I"ve thrown at it so far.

>>> from dateutil import parser
>>> parser.parse("Tue Jun 22 07:46:22 EST 2010")
datetime.datetime(2010, 6, 22, 7, 46, 22, tzinfo=tzlocal())
>>> parser.parse("Fri, 11 Nov 2011 03:18:09 -0400")
datetime.datetime(2011, 11, 11, 3, 18, 9, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, -14400))
>>> parser.parse("Sun")
datetime.datetime(2011, 12, 18, 0, 0)
>>> parser.parse("10-11-08")
datetime.datetime(2008, 10, 11, 0, 0)

and so on. No dealing with strptime() format nonsense... just throw a date at it and it Does The Right Thing.

Update: Oops. I missed in your original question that you mentioned that you used dateutil, sorry about that. But I hope this answer is still useful to other people who stumble across this question when they have date parsing questions and see the utility of that module.

Distribution Fitting with Sum of Square Error (SSE)

This is an update and modification to Saullo"s answer, that uses the full list of the current scipy.stats distributions and returns the distribution with the least SSE between the distribution"s histogram and the data"s histogram.

Example Fitting

Using the El Ni√±o dataset from statsmodels, the distributions are fit and error is determined. The distribution with the least error is returned.

All Distributions

Best Fit Distribution

Example Code

%matplotlib inline

import warnings
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import scipy.stats as st
import statsmodels.api as sm
from scipy.stats._continuous_distns import _distn_names
import matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

matplotlib.rcParams["figure.figsize"] = (16.0, 12.0)
matplotlib.style.use("ggplot")

# Create models from data
def best_fit_distribution(data, bins=200, ax=None):
    """Model data by finding best fit distribution to data"""
    # Get histogram of original data
    y, x = np.histogram(data, bins=bins, density=True)
    x = (x + np.roll(x, -1))[:-1] / 2.0

    # Best holders
    best_distributions = []

    # Estimate distribution parameters from data
    for ii, distribution in enumerate([d for d in _distn_names if not d in ["levy_stable", "studentized_range"]]):

        print("{:>3} / {:<3}: {}".format( ii+1, len(_distn_names), distribution ))

        distribution = getattr(st, distribution)

        # Try to fit the distribution
        try:
            # Ignore warnings from data that can"t be fit
            with warnings.catch_warnings():
                warnings.filterwarnings("ignore")
                
                # fit dist to data
                params = distribution.fit(data)

                # Separate parts of parameters
                arg = params[:-2]
                loc = params[-2]
                scale = params[-1]
                
                # Calculate fitted PDF and error with fit in distribution
                pdf = distribution.pdf(x, loc=loc, scale=scale, *arg)
                sse = np.sum(np.power(y - pdf, 2.0))
                
                # if axis pass in add to plot
                try:
                    if ax:
                        pd.Series(pdf, x).plot(ax=ax)
                    end
                except Exception:
                    pass

                # identify if this distribution is better
                best_distributions.append((distribution, params, sse))
        
        except Exception:
            pass

    
    return sorted(best_distributions, key=lambda x:x[2])

def make_pdf(dist, params, size=10000):
    """Generate distributions"s Probability Distribution Function """

    # Separate parts of parameters
    arg = params[:-2]
    loc = params[-2]
    scale = params[-1]

    # Get sane start and end points of distribution
    start = dist.ppf(0.01, *arg, loc=loc, scale=scale) if arg else dist.ppf(0.01, loc=loc, scale=scale)
    end = dist.ppf(0.99, *arg, loc=loc, scale=scale) if arg else dist.ppf(0.99, loc=loc, scale=scale)

    # Build PDF and turn into pandas Series
    x = np.linspace(start, end, size)
    y = dist.pdf(x, loc=loc, scale=scale, *arg)
    pdf = pd.Series(y, x)

    return pdf

# Load data from statsmodels datasets
data = pd.Series(sm.datasets.elnino.load_pandas().data.set_index("YEAR").values.ravel())

# Plot for comparison
plt.figure(figsize=(12,8))
ax = data.plot(kind="hist", bins=50, density=True, alpha=0.5, color=list(matplotlib.rcParams["axes.prop_cycle"])[1]["color"])

# Save plot limits
dataYLim = ax.get_ylim()

# Find best fit distribution
best_distibutions = best_fit_distribution(data, 200, ax)
best_dist = best_distibutions[0]

# Update plots
ax.set_ylim(dataYLim)
ax.set_title(u"El Niño sea temp.
 All Fitted Distributions")
ax.set_xlabel(u"Temp (°C)")
ax.set_ylabel("Frequency")

# Make PDF with best params 
pdf = make_pdf(best_dist[0], best_dist[1])

# Display
plt.figure(figsize=(12,8))
ax = pdf.plot(lw=2, label="PDF", legend=True)
data.plot(kind="hist", bins=50, density=True, alpha=0.5, label="Data", legend=True, ax=ax)

param_names = (best_dist[0].shapes + ", loc, scale").split(", ") if best_dist[0].shapes else ["loc", "scale"]
param_str = ", ".join(["{}={:0.2f}".format(k,v) for k,v in zip(param_names, best_dist[1])])
dist_str = "{}({})".format(best_dist[0].name, param_str)

ax.set_title(u"El Niño sea temp. with best fit distribution 
" + dist_str)
ax.set_xlabel(u"Temp. (°C)")
ax.set_ylabel("Frequency")