On Thursday 21 November 2002 10:42 am, Kent West wrote: > Derrick 'dman' Hudson wrote: > >On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 10:04:30PM -0800, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote: > >| On Wednesday 20 November 2002 21:06, Kent West wrote: > >| > I'm just curious; do other folks (particularly real developers, > >| > not just tinkerer-wanna-be's like myself) have a similar problem > >| > with Java, or have I just been channeling too much RMS lately? > > > >I would avoid java if I wasn't require to use it in class and at > > work. Since I am required, use this apt sources line and install > > the 'j2sdk1.4' package. > > deb ftp://ftp.tux.org/pub/java/debian/ sid main non-free > > > >| If you are looking for an easy, fun, quick to learn language give > >| Python a try. > > > >I agree here. In fact, python is older, more cross-platform and > > more OO than java is. All it lacks is the marketing budget of Sun. > > > >-D > > Shaleh was the one to plug python first. But what dman says here gets > my attention. Do others concur that python is more cross-platform and > more OO than java? What are the disadvantages with python as opposed > to java? Why would someone pick java over python then? Is it only > because of marketing, as dman says? > > Kent
I write c++ code for my job and don't have any experience with either java or python (other than nominally playing around with python). Python is developed in c, so if an architecture has a compliant c compiler, more than likely, you can get the python interpreter compiled and run your python scripts. Porting java to a new architecture is probably harder as evidence by the lack of willing partners to get the blackdown port of the latest (1.4??) running on the powerpc chip. Reasons for choosing one over the other: 1. Performance 2. Development enviroment -- toolchain support. 3. Availability of qualified developers that know the language -- certainly more java developers than python. 4. Notion of higher (or better) cross-platform support for the big 3 in OSes (Windows, UNIX/Linux, MacOS(X)) -- companies actually provide the support for these enviroments as opposed to volunteers in the open source community. 5. Library support (or the availability) for the given application. 6. Size of application, how well does the language scale for large code bases. Scripting languages don't as a rule scale -- you don't write tens of thousands lines of code in a scripting language -- although I have heard that python does scale much better than tcl for example. You will always hear someone say, but ". . oh I have written X number of lines of code in blah, and it was just fine. . ." Is that typical?? 7. Higher ups dictating the tool for the job without understanding all of the requirements -- pros, cons of using one tool over the other. 8. Marketing hype (or lack of). I am not a language expert to know if python is more or less OO than java. This depends on your definition of OO (which even defies an absolute definition from the language gurus). I would certainly think that python would work better for gluing different applications together than java, since scripting languages do a good job in this department. I also think that python would win for rapid prototyping some code idea. It might also be more fun to develop in python because of the rapid feedback from working in an interpretative enviroment. John -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
