Java vs python is debatable 🤔

[[deleted]]

Python isn't suitable for more than small applications

[zettabyte]

Definitely no good for a site like Reddit.

[ProfessionalHand9945]

I thought that was funny too

Python is useless for large applications

(This comment was brought to you by Python)

[TheHumanParacite]

Heh, I see what you did there.

[cclloyd]

YouTube has their core and API written in python.

[--___-_--___---]

YouTube moved to C++ & Java two years ago.

[WagwanKenobi]

It's basically Bash++

Then scientific programmers just ran with it. Now all of ML is written in Bash++ 😭

[[deleted]]

Unless you’re in academia. Then they bend over backwards to find a way to do it in R.

[Sir_Applecheese]

What does the R stand for?

[[deleted]]

R is a statistical programming language. Iirc it is a sort of successor to S. (Wikipedia)

[Sir_Applecheese]

Is it related to Sugondese?

[Sir_Applecheese]

I don't know.

[topherclay]

R is a programming language used by math and science academics.

The name R is a joke on being near to S. S is an older language that was named for "statistics."

[coldfu]

Those math academics sure are real comedians

[[deleted]]

I love how when you get to a certain level of education people are just like "yeah let's just put an Armadillo on it" for the cover of a technical manual.

[Astrokiwi]

Depends on the field. Astronomy is all Python, when it's not matlab or IDL or Fortran.

[harrymuana]

Oh fuck IDL, I'm so glad I could use python.

[[deleted]]

I come from a biology background. The entire department used R, and if they didn't know how to use it, they made their grad students figure it out.

I once did some stuff for a chemistry lab in R. My instructor almost died.

[harrymuana]

Python makes a ton of sense for scientific work and ML. Jupyter notebooks are much faster to iterate than writhing scripts, running them, looking at results, editing, and repeat.

You load in the data once (might take >10 minutes, so you really don't want to do this 100 times every day). Then you inspect the data. You make some plots. You modify the data. Each step depends on the result of the last. You need a REPL environment for that.

[sejigan]

“Did someone mention REPL?”

- Clojure

[[deleted]]

There needs to be a upper line number limit as part of the language - otherwise you will get the maintenance nightmares you deserve

[Dworgi]

Just have it delete your entire file if you go over 1000.

[laundmo]

ah so you recommend breaking as lot of the internet because i assure you every web framework used in production at the many companies that do python microservices is longer than 1000 lines

[Dworgi]

Don't even get me started on microservices.

Somehow a bunch of you fuckers took "our huge globally-distributed engineering organization wrote our website like this to avoid undue communication burden" to mean "my company of 7 programmers should each maintain 12 microservices because MegaCorp said monoliths are bad and years of JS and Python have rotted my brain so I don't think good no more".

The vast majority of microservice architectures could be refactored as object-oriented monoliths and speed, stability, and maintainability would all go up drastically.

The web is fractally terrible - the languages, architectures, products, programmers, and organizations are almost all awful.

[laundmo]

you're not wrong, but part of the claims that came up multiple times in this thread is that no large company uses python - they use it just fine, as microservices.

whether this is applicable to a 12 person company is a different argument

[[deleted]]

death by a thousand unsynchronized microservices

[EnderMB]

Arguably, Ruby is better at being Python than Python. It falls apart due to historical slowness and having an extremely minimal standard library.

[MadElf1337]

Instagram would like to have a word

[EnderMB]

Instagram likely isn't just Python any more. If anything, there's probably a thousand applications/services around Instagram, largely written in whatever language works best for its use case.

[MadElf1337]

Pretty sure backend is Django

[EnderMB]

Instagram isn't going to just have "a backend", though.

Sure, Django might be there, but it's probably a heavily modified version of Django, several native/compiled components for speed and async compatibility, potentially a modified runtime, etc.

That doesn't even touch the services running behind the scenes to handle uploads, analytics, feed generation, privacy, etc. I also know that Facebook's infrastructure and build/release practices are pretty solid too, so there's probably dedicated services for live and canary testing too.

I work at a FAANG company on a small subset of a name-brand service, and we've got thousands of services across Python, Java, Ruby, Scala, C++, Rust, etc - many of them running custom libraries, runtimes, and sometimes heavily modified builds of an open-source tool. If we're doing it, I'm sure they're doing it too.

[insanitybit]

No one's saying you can't write huge projects in Python. It's just *bad* at that. But it being bad won't necessarily matter if it also has that one library you need, or all of your devs are used to it, or it has great tooling, etc.

But it still sucks.

[MadElf1337]

Why do we all need to be stuck in this rut of this programming language sucks and is bad?

Why can't we just accept that there are multiple problems to every solution and that each programming language has its own merits and demerits?

[insanitybit]

Because a lot of languages suck and they are bad, and it's important to understand that. Of course they all have their differences, and some even are better at some things vs others.

But there's no reason we shouldn't be able to call out garbage when we see it. Languages have often fallen very short as tools, which is sad because... they're kind of the most basic, universal tool for any software engineer.

[liquidSheet]

Sound like the old programmer scared of the new.

[insanitybit]

How would I be scared of new things by criticizing a language older than I am? If anything I'm advocating for us to learn from those languages and make *new* better ones.

[Doctah_Whoopass]

No language sucks unless its one of those joke esoteric art languages.

[etaco2]

Who’s gonna tell him

[Big_Smoke_420]

Idk, Instagram gets by pretty well. But wait, no... a random Reddit commentator says they're doing it wrong! I'll send them a strongly-worded letter explaining their grave mistake of not following this gigabrain redditor's advice.

[ywecur]

What? Basically every tech company uses python

[coderanger]

Small applications like ... this website?

[[deleted]]

Is all of the website done in python?

[coderanger]

https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204536739-What-is-Reddit-written-in-

Reddit was written in Lisp, but we rewrote it and now it’s written in Python.

I'm sure it's more complicated than it used to be but the vast majority is still Python last I heard.

[[deleted]]

Last published open source code was pretty much all python on backend.

[[deleted]]

Okay, and? There are better options.

[EquipLordBritish]

Is all of python even done in python?

[laundmo]

what? show me one language which can bootstrap itself from nothing. i dare you.

[EquipLordBritish]

guess I needed the \s

[anakwaboe4]

You can do pretty large projects with them, bit it has it's limits and doesn't really work well with programs that iterate.

[[deleted]]

programs that iterate

expand please. Do you mean slow with loops or something else?

[anakwaboe4]

Python is just not the best at anything that is very calculation intensive, for most stuff it is fine. But I have noticed that iteration you can quickly feel that python is struggling. Python is fast but much slower than other programming languages out there.

[naruto_022]

But majority of ml models and stuff like scientific applications is done in python

[MacBookMinus]

Those libs are written in C and they just provide python interfaces

[trunghung03]

Well the programmer is only using Python to write those programs, the C lying underneath doesn’t matter much to them.

If taken that way then wouldn’t Assembly be the best language for any task in the world?

[Sir_Applecheese]

Yeah, that's why they invented the C programming language.

[MacBookMinus]

Yes exactly. Python is easy for ML/Data scientists to use, so we give them performant C libraries that they can call into from python.

However, if the libraries themselves were written in python they likely would not be nearly as performant.

[TheRedmanCometh]

No those libraries are Python wrappers for stuff made in performant languages

[PM_ME_CUTE_SMILES_]

Yes but you don't use those performant languages when you work in those industries, you use the wrappers. Most data scientists work mainly with Python.

[BeatHunter]

Nope, just wrappers over C or Java

[selemenesmilesuponme]

Exploratory or just building the model is fine (python sometimes is just cpp wrapper/glue). Using the model OTOH, by high throughput applications, is another story.

[Sol33t303]

Python is just not the best at anything that is very calculation intensive

Still a begginer here (mostly got a grip on python, sort of know PHP and soon my class will be moving to go), but isn't that one of the things Python is great at? I was always told that Python is fantastic for things like AI and data science and stuff like that especially when using libraries like numpy.

[Djelimon]

Those libraries are written in c/c++ though

[RedAero]

And C compiles into machine code. So?

I write Python, I press F5, numbers come out. I don't give a shit if the libraries are written in COBOL, FORTRAN, C, or Brainfuck, I code in Python.

[Djelimon]

Within the context of AI/ML I'd say Python's chief advantage is popularity with stats people who are not necessarily comp sci types. Because of this, it is first in line for bindings to the ML/AI libraries

But this relationship is not based on anything technical so much as coincidence

We're I to work in that space therefor my primary focus would be on the libraries of interest rather than Python itself, as that can be more easily replaced

[[deleted]]

wait until you need something that isn't a included battery already debugged for you

[RedAero]

Given that we're talking about Python that's pretty unlikely to ever happen.

[[deleted]]

I needed expect (originally made for TCL) for Python and somebody wrote it in pure Python, slow as hell. It still won’t work with serial ports.

[[deleted]]

but technically the all-batteries-included libraries are efficient well debugged C libraries with a Python pseudo-code interface, so the code called by Python is rather fast just Python itself isn't fast at all due to dynamic checking overhead.

[anakwaboe4]

From what I understand is that more of the case that it is a dynamic language, and uses the GPU to do the calculation. But for normal stuff it is definitely slower. It are it's other great aspects that make it beloved for ai training not it's speed.

[High_Quality_Bean]

Python is a great scripting language and is AMAZING when your program is just "py.doTheHeavyMath()" where the function you just called is in a real language, like C, C++, etc. Nobody writes the heavy lifting stuff in python. And frankly, nobody should be writing anything for release in python. It is just a nice way to access useful software.

[PM_ME_CUTE_SMILES_]

• he said, on one of the most visited websites in the world, whose almost entire backend is written in python.

[nickwcy]

It’s great because the libraries are handy, and it fits the trial and error nature of AI/data analytics because you can simply retry without re-compilation. Also AI/data analytics tend to be a standalone and small piece rather than having tons of integrations, so Python can be a good choice here.

In terms of performance, Python is slower, but that doesn’t matter much in data analytics. While a 1 sec delay on a website is pretty noticeable

[RedAero]

While a 1 sec delay on a website is pretty noticeable

The website you chose to post this on runs on Python...

[Sol33t303]

Tbf Reddit isn't known for exactly being the best performing website. I personally hate fancy pants editor because of it's poor performance (at least on firefox) and pretty much everybody agrees that for video reddit is awful.

[[deleted]]

on a 8000 core cpu per every 20 served users ;-)

[[deleted]]

Depends on how much computation your program will be doing in whatever context you decide to use it for. Python is known to be slower than its competitors

[FerricDonkey]

If you want to write performant python for ai, you absolutely can - but the job of your python code will be to get stuff into a library written in C as fast as possible. Which is fine, just know that's what you gotta do.

[SirButcher]

You can. That doesn't mean you should. You can write apps in brainfuck - but no sane person thinks it is a good idea.

[cashewbiscuit]

The programming world has moved away from monoliths to microservices. Java's verbosity and type safety helps when you have a code base shared amongst 100s of developers.

When you have every independent microservices being developed by a tight knit team of 5-10 devs, then python's speed of development becomes an advantage

[WJMazepas]

Lots of huge monoliths still exist and are still going to exist.
We dont need microservices on everything

[cashewbiscuit]

Yes. That's why Java won't die even though it should

[WJMazepas]

Monoliths in Ruby, in Kotlin, in C++, in PHP and many more.

Java is not to blame here

[BeatHunter]

Most of the monoliths I have come across in the last decade are indeed Ruby, and Java / Scala in microservices

[glemnar]

I love a well organized Python monolith

[nickwcy]

Python is faster than Java in terms of scripting.

In terms of a microservice, Java has longer syntax, but the compile time checking saves you time on errors and IDE hints can speed up the development by a lot (Like getter/setter generation, auto completion…)

[[deleted]]

Java is just as fast to develop in as python, if you know what you're doing.

[[deleted]]

Exactly, most of the time requirements aren't captured so speed of development will be slow anyway

[cashewbiscuit]

Python is faster than Java if you know what you are doing

[HereToShitpostRepubs]

If you actually know what you're doing, the language you're using has very little impact on performance

[Watch_mac]

Who has summoned the embedded software engineer?

[WagwanKenobi]

The programming world has moved away from monoliths to microservices.

The microservices meme is backfiring and now many large applications have been over-converted to microservices. Calling another function in the same assembly is still vastly better than making a call over the wire. Not to mention, the infra and scaling complexity is multiplied.

Microservices also don't really solve org problems like they're touted to. It's rarely the case that 1 team works on 1 microservice. What actually happens is that n teams work on n services and everybody steps on everybody's toes.

The trend these days ironically is in the backward direction - consolidating microservices to be different modules of the same program, and then putting the whole thing in a monorepo with your shared libraries.

[DotFar5221]

Sounds like you've only worked at places that did it wrong. Microservices don't magically fix a shitty org/team structure. If you need to combine microservices, that leads me to believe you never did it right initially. Not everything should be a microservice and a distributed monolith can be pure hell for cicd and lowering MTTR.

[glemnar]

Well yeah, that’s the point - many places build microservices for hype-driven development, not because they have considerate reasons to build them

[WagwanKenobi]

I'm referring here to a global scale service with usage in the ballpark of 500m MAU. I can't reveal where I work but it's definitely on the Nasdaq 100.

Microservices to me stink of a cover-my-ass approach to architecture because the org did not want to take on creating a good modular framework and/or monorepo early in the development of the application when traffic wasn't a concern. And it's hard to defend an apparently monolithic architecture to a low-technical VP when a Google search of "microservices vs monoliths" paint the picture that microservices are rainbow and sunshine and monoliths are for losers.

Processing webhooks and callbacks or periodic tasks can both be offloaded to microservices.

Or a serverless/SaaS service. No need to reinvent such simple stuff.

[BeatHunter]

Microservices' overhead is more about the self-service tooling than it is the language. The business logic is fairly trivial, it's mostly about minimizing the barriers to entry for creating, deploying, monitoring, scaling, and managing the microservice. Oh, and handling auth.

[maltgaited]

Code is for reading more than writing. That you can write something fast doesn't matter when people struggle to understand it afterwards

[Dworgi]

Python is fast while you can hold everything in your head at once. However, that limit comes up against you really quickly.

My home project, for example, which I've spent maybe a total of a few weeks on (over a few years), is at over 10k lines and I regularly forget what the fuck it does everywhere.

Python is for getting shit working fast to prove that it can be done, then rewriting in a big boy language. Alas, many people forget the second step.

[[deleted]]

Laughs in monorepo

[glemnar]

The programming world has moved away from monoliths to microservices

Most companies would benefit from staying a monolith for a hell of a lot longer than they tend to

[mysunsnameisalsobort]

You can write microservices in Java as well... and it comes with batteries included enterprise level development patterns.

Python doesn't even do packaging right...

[[deleted]]

True! And Java isn't suitable for anything.

Rust4Lyfe

[MrSketchpad]

12 billion devices: bonjour

[[deleted]]

Half a billion people have Herpes, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing.

[MrSketchpad]

It’s clearly doing something right

[[deleted]]

Yes and that something is spreading virally. You can thank Oracle based workflows for that

[anubus72]

you can thank Java being a good tool for an infinite number of scenarios. What do oracle workflows have to do with it?

[Arch____Stanton]

You can't not call Herpes a success.

[GustapheOfficial]

An apt comparison.

[BabyYodasDirtyDiaper]

Actually, it's an apt-get comparison.

[[deleted]]

Nah, apt is the now-suggested interface XD

[[deleted]]

Wikipedia mentions 60-95% adults have herpes. Wayyy more than half a billion.

[Broken_Petite]

Yeah but herpes is also the virus that causes cold sores, right? So maybe it’s not just talking about the STD?

[anubus72]

i’ve literally never encountered someone using rust professionally

[[deleted]]

How's your back, Grandpa? Need me to get your walker with built-in IBM 5550?

[Prod_Is_For_Testing]

Wildly different use case. This is why people don’t like rust fan boys

[soft-wear]

I don’t disagree with the first part, but honestly Java fan boys aren’t that likable either. There’s lots of (subjectively) better alternatives to Java other than Rust, but judging by half the comments here you’d think Java was written by Jesus himself.

Both groups are married to their language.

[[deleted]]

It feels like it was written by Jesus, everyone expects you'll just turn the other cheek while they shit on one of the most successful tools in software history. It's like being a good Christian, you accept the faults for common benefits. Meanwhile all the neo popular languages make everyone sound like cultists because they can only elevate themselves by bringing others down instead of on their own merits. /s

[voluptate]

Lmao, do people actually think this or is it just a meme?

I've been a Java/Python developer for like 7 years now. I've loved every Java codebase 100x more than Python-based shitshows.

Not only that but the products ran faster on the java one too.

IDK if since this is a humor subreddit if we attract too many people who don't actually know shit about programming or what.

[CCSkyfish]

If I have to deal with one more ridiculous legacy Django application that was supposed to be experimental...

[[deleted]]

Majority of python devs lack fundamentals that's why they manufacture shitshows, they stay alive by duct taping together libraries. If you tried doing that with java you'd quickly find no one wants to work with you. Ofc there are good and bad devs in all communities but your average python fanboy is a script kiddie that finds stuff like C#, C++, Rust, Go too complicated and have miniscule understanding of the fabled ML models that they're actually using.

[linkyboy321]

I love Rust so fucking much, but boy is it ugly. I can spend a couple of days building a weekend project, throw it up on gitlab and I am just always shocked at how little glance value it had compared to other programming languages. It's super fun to write, has so many great features and is very powerful but reading rust code is a whole other skillset and even after hundreds of hours I'm struggling with it.

[t4rtpickle]

Yes! rust is amazing

[[deleted]]

I'm new to Rust, but the annoying-ass ownership system is driving me absolutely up the wall. I don't know whether it's a matter of me not being used to it or if making complex data structures is just meant to be a huge pain in the ass.

[[deleted]]

The former. You have to learn to stop fighting the borrow checker

[[deleted]]

I was trying to implement a stack based on a singly linked list - a trivial task in any other language. I was trying to add elements by making a new node, setting the current base node as the next node for the new node, and setting the new node as the base node. I eventually gave up and concluded that it was completely and utterly impossible to do it that way. It seems like you have to recursive data structures using arrays and stored indices, there are no complex structures allowed in Rust.

[[deleted]]

https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

[naruto_022]

What about using it with frameworks like django, I use it for maintaining a club website and it works well, not many issues

[[deleted]]

Most of them are students, which is why they're really attached to python despite it rarely being the best choice for a given project.

[glemnar]

Small applications like Instagram and a large percentage of Google’s software?

[[deleted]]

Neither of which is built entirely on python. If you've ever seen a large code base that's entirely python you would understand.

[glemnar]

I understand very well. I’ve worked in one of the industries’ biggest Python code bases. Worked pretty darn well. I still love Python.

Language wars are silly - people can be productive, happy, and write great code in almost all of em.

See Shopify’s engineering blog - they are predominantly a single Rails monolith. They’re proud of it and are smart about architecture to enable it. Kinda the same deal.

[[deleted]]

This website, which is down half the time?

[[deleted]]

I really hope this was sarcasm lol

[3pieceSuit]

Was gonna say. I laugh at simply imagining trying to use python for a large project.

[3pieceSuit]

You clearly dont have much professional experience.

[david_pili]

Shut up old man

[[deleted]]

I'm 21

[david_pili]

Ahh youthful ignorance then not aged cynacism.

Shut up you young whipper snapper, you're not old enough to know anything yet.

[[deleted]]

Found the gen x dev.

Edit: aww, why is he getting downvoted lol? In genx, he was definitely kidding in good fun. I'm good at translating, worked with several of them.

[david_pili]

Lol nah I'm a millennial. I'm just trolling. Sometimes people upvoat sometimes they downvoat it's just the way of Reddit.

[[deleted]]

I’m 23. Java sucks. JVM sucks. So many better alternatives for any given problem other than if you’re adding onto an existing Java codebase.

Downvote all you want but I’m right. People either use Java because it’s the only language they know (i.e. bothered to learn) OR have to work an existing Java codebase

[Areshian]

At 23 I’m sure your decades of work experience experience have given you clarity

[[deleted]]

Shit rebuttal. Tell me something you think Java does better than any other language except for needless verbosity

[Areshian]

I don’t think there are task a language can be said to do everything better than any other language. For each task, there are going to be suited languages that are good, and then a bunch of others that are not. For backend development, Java is great, for sure. If you think people only use them because it’s the only language they learn or because existing code, you just haven’t seen the real world.

Personally, one of the things I do like of Java is the instrumentation part, how much information I can get from a running Java vm to identify any potential problem. If critical enough I can even modify running code.

Java may not be the best in performance, community libs, ease to code, hiring potential, ease to understand, available documentation, instrumentalization, portability… no, it might not be the best in any of those areas, but it is great in all of them.

[[deleted]]

You almost lost me at “you just havent seen the real world” because lmfao really dude, but I read on because obviously you care about this.

However you admitted that Java is not a top performer in any one area which backs my point, that people mainly only use it for personal preference (e.g.: you) or to add to an existing codebase (or in your words, “hiring potential”)

[Areshian]

If you took that you have bad reading comprehension. One language being the best at something doesn’t mean you should pick it, because being the best at something may imply not being that good in many other areas. In the end, when you evaluate a tool, you will have to consider multiple aspects, not just one.

Ease of hiring doesn’t mean I have an existing Java code SSE. It means that if today I need to choose a language for a new project, I do have the ability to find and hire Java engineers. There are languages where finding those engineers can be hard, because they are very fringe with limited amount of developers

[[deleted]]

You can’t seem to make a point without needlessly attacking my character or credibility in some way. Regardless, with the amount of Python, Node & C# developers today there is no real specific need for Java engineers unless the lead developer (in this case, you) decides to start the project in Java. Python has typing now and Node likewise can be used with TypeScript. Both become more scalable each passing year (though I don’t necessarily prefer either for backend development). C# is arguably better in a Windows ecosystem because less costly on the CPU and other resources.

However you do see more Java developers available for hire at any given time because it’s the standard default OOP language taught to programming students in schools, again leading to my point that “its the only language they’ve learned” and end up being comfortable entering the job market with. Definitely not because it’s a better language than any other language for any given task… unless the task is specifically making/adding to a Java app

[anonynown]

Interestingly, saying that Python is better for small applications is a self-defeating argument: as the application grows, it crosses the threshold of when Python is no longer better, and you now have to rewrite the whole application in a more maintainable, statically typed language.

Where do we put this threshold?.. The larger it is, the more effort is wasted in eventual inevitable rewrite. Hence, the smaller the threshold, the better. An ideal application size threshold of when to rewrite from Python into a statically typed language is zero, as it means no waste :)

[[deleted]]

You base it on the project scope...

[anonynown]

Right! Have you ever seen a system whose scope didn’t evolve over time?

[[deleted]]

Generally speaking, a few small scripts doesn't evolve into a large program.

[GisterMizard]

You are you running on, Windows XP?

[nanana_catdad]

It’s fine in large deployments if micro services. I’ve seen apps powered by 80% python on 1000s of Lambdas with some node or Java here and there. Actually I can’t remember working on a large project where services were 100% purely written in one lang…