The question is, basically: what would be more preferable, both performance-wise and design-wise - to have a list of objects of a Python class or to have several lists of numerical properties?
I am writing some sort of a scientific simulation which involves a rather large system of interacting particles. For simplicity, let's say we have a set of balls bouncing inside a box so each ball has a number of numerical properties, like x-y-z-coordinates, diameter, mass, velocity vector and so on. How to store the system better? Two major options I can think of are:
to make a class "Ball" with those properties and some methods, then store a list of objects of the class, e. g. [b1, b2, b3, ...bn, ...], where for each bn we can access bn.x, bn.y, bn.mass and so on;
to make an array of numbers for each property, then for each i-th "ball" we can access it's 'x' coordinate as xs[i], 'y' coordinate as ys[i], 'mass' as masses[i] and so on;
To me it seems that the first option represents a better design. The second option looks somewhat uglier, but might be better in terms of performance, and it could be easier to use it with numpy and scipy, which I try to use as much as I can.
I am still not sure if Python will be fast enough, so it may be necessary to rewrite it in C++ or something, after initial prototyping in Python. Would the choice of data representation be different for C/C++? What about a hybrid approach, e.g. Python with C++ extension?
Update: I never expected any performance gain from parallel arrays per se, but in a mixed environment like Python + Numpy (or whatever SlowScriptingLanguage + FastNativeLibrary) using them may (or may not?) let you move more work out of you slow scripting code and into the fast native library.
I think it depends on what you're going to be doing with them, and how often you're going to be working with (all attributes of one particle) vs (one attribute of all particles). The former is better suited to the object approach; the latter is better suited to the array approach.
I was facing a similar problem (although in a different domain) a couple of years ago. The project got deprioritized before I actually implemented this phase, but I was leaning towards a hybrid approach, where in addition to the Ball class I would have an Ensemble class. The Ensemble would not be a list or other simple container of Balls, but would have its own attributes (which would be arrays) and its own methods. Whether the Ensemble is created from the Balls, or the Balls from the Ensemble, depends on how you're going to construct them. 
One of my coworkers was arguing for a solution where the fundamental object was an Ensemble which might contain only one Ball, so that no calling code would ever have to know whether you were operating on just one Ball (do you ever do that for your application?) or on many.
List of objects or parallel arrays of properties?