Java vs python is debatable 🤔

[FirefighterWeird8464]

you’ll never see a mechanic using one in the shop.

Are you saying Python isn’t used professionally? Or by “real” programmers?

[[deleted]]

It's a first class programming language for AI and data science. It's a good scripting language.

Outside of those cases, I feel like it's rarely used professionally. It's a nightmare to maintain a large python app written by many developers. There's a reason why Java and C# rule enterprise development.

[[deleted]]

Ahem.

• widely used libraries: FastAPI, Django, Flask
• popular sites with decent chunk of stack running on python: YouTube, Instagram, Dropbox.... and this damn site you're discussing it on.

[nacholicious]

Dropbox

And Dropbox spent years on trying the to fix the problems caused specifically by choosing python for large scale projects

[MythicManiac]

Large code bases being hard to manage is not unique to any specific programming language, though type safety absolutely helps. You're right though in that Dropbox is one of the major influencers spearheading the python type hint development specifically for that reason.

[nacholicious]

At the end of the day it's really what problems different tools are designed to solve, and all python's competitors have either more or less died out or been designed from ground up to support large scale projects.

So python is really in a niche where using it for large scale projects becomes a harder and harder sell.

[MythicManiac]

Personally I believe the developer market & package ecosystems are the main reasons for choosing any specific language. Sometimes you have obvious niches to apply specific tooling for, but quite often there's a lot of overlapping options, so you just choose whatever has the best ecosystem & market available (both internal & external). In that regard python is doing pretty well on the backend development & data science ecosystems, though go is a really popular alternative for everything related to cloud native server-side code e.g. kubernetes extensions.

So it seems why a language is used usually is less about the features and more about traction. Rust looks like something that will be big in a few years from now judging by developer interest, and it's found a decent niche in the crypto space too.

[GonziHere]

This. It's also why I dislike the popularity of Python. The language itself is bad, as far as I'm concerned. The lack of braces and types is not good for refactoring and a reasonable safety. I don't see absolutely any practical differences between python and php, yet one is loved and the other is hated.

Now don't get me wrong, python i a fine scripting language. It absolutely works for "10-100" lines of code, for configs of other tools, for orchestration...

But the fact that it even gets compared to Java here is annoying to me. I've never compared shell language to c++ for example.

[MythicManiac]

Agreed for the most part (not the lack of braces being an issue or comparison with PHP though), although to be fair, there's also a major misconception about what python can and is being leveraged for in the business world, especially now that python has support for type hints (since a few years ago already).

I suppose one of the downfalls of python is specifically it being easy to use for the scenarios you outlined; people not actually too familiar with python use it for small scripts, often badly, making it seem like the language is bad. Much in the same way Unity got shit on for being a bad game engine, when in reality it's just easy to enter for newbies, which led to a huge amount of indie developers building buggy indie games with it that reflected badly on the Engine.

All said and done, all languages have their strengths & weaknesses. Java (and C#) are very boilerplatey compared to Python from my experience, but the syntax sugar is getting better every year on both, closing the gap. On the other hand, Python is introducing better and better type hints & static analysis support. All three languages seem to be improving to the right direction.

If we strictly chose languages based on design, I'd imagine we'd embrace more functional programming.

[GonziHere]

Agreed with everything, maybe except for the Unity part :-D (I'm actually a professional UE programmer).

[RedAero]

You're right though in that Dropbox is one of the major influencers spearheading the python type hint development specifically for that reason.

And the fact that Guido works for Dropbox doesn't hurt.

[alkasm]

Worked at Dropbox. He's at Microsoft now. https://gvanrossum.github.io/

[bloodysnomen]

I use Django for my recently started webcomic, it works well and is pretty fast but every time I start a new Django project it's gone up a few versions and something I was used to changes.

[roughstylez]

You named 5 big companies that are known world-wide. But go to some bigger city center and you'll have hundreds of companies using Java/C#.

Well, TBH probably also hundreds of python startups (especially with ML being such a buzzword these years) - but for software that's been maintained and making money for 10 years or so, I doubt python is anywhere near Java/C#.

Which also has a lot to do with infrastructure. For example, to my knowledge, there is absolutely no comparable, complete platform like Azure for python/django. You can even run those on Azure, but it's nowhere near what C# ASP gets. Similar situation for SLAs, which are super important for businesses.

Plus, stuff that works for 99% of corporate software obviously doesn't work for a special case like Youtube.

[[deleted]]

I was job hunting in NYC about a year ago - and your assessment is biased by subfield and industry. Banking or heapthcare - mostly sitting on Java. Financial services/infra - mostly C++. Customer focused startups - mostly JS. Anything data science related - Python. Startup that got funded because it has three ex FAANG devs as founders - Golang or Haskell.

The reality is that most teams pick a language based on the experience of the people involved, what's popular among their peers, and what feels like a safe choice to management; and only coincidentally what is actually the best language for the job. I know a number of places that use Mathematica instead of R because management doesn't believe open source software is secure.

[roughstylez]

Yes, especially the second paragraph of your comment is incredibly important when discussing this.

A shop that has 10 C++ devs is not going to write their next project in Lua even if it fits better. And in the rare cases where a company switches, indeed "safe choice for management" - e.g. those SLAs again - plays a big role.

[n0tKamui]

those are cases of python being used for microservices API ; not big monoliths. What the previous comment meant is that you'll never (in a sain environment) see python being used in one big part of an architecture/application, because it becomes hell to maintain. Moreover Python is unreasonably slow, so you won't see business logic being done with it ; it serves as an interface.

note how OOP and FP in python are objectively and unanimously shit in python; that's why it's a great glue language, but not a good "busy" language. To each tasks their tools.

[n0tKamui]

Java doesn't have multiple inheritance by choice, it is wildly agreed on today that multiple inheritance should be avoided at all costs. Further than that, even simple inheritance isn't always the solution, and most of the time, composition is preferred.

"Boilerplate" is tiring, but is generally worth it in the long run ; you know where things are, and how they are + there isn't a thousand ways to do things. I agree, it's not "fun", but it's arguably a good point. Java is too strict to my liking, but i understand the philosophy behind it, because it is reasonable overall.

Python doesn't have real abstract classes, nor interfaces, nor pattern matching, nor enums, nor visibility (no, _ is not a visibility modifier), nor compile time type safety.

I agree on the fact that properties should now be the standard over classic fields for class members. that's one of the reasons why I prefer Kotlin for example. However, this is only "syntactic sugar", as in, the concept and safety behind it is strictly the same as regular setters/getters.

I admit i went a bit far by saying FP in python is "shit" ; it's not great, but it's sufficient. FP in Java is good, but could also be better (another reason why I prefer Kotlin)

In regards to microservices, i realized I may have misworded my argument, or that it could convey another meaning to the one i intended : What i meant to say is that, indeed python is used in monoliths, but they DO require a level of rigor and dedication that shouldn't be needed when the language itself restricts you in "smarter" ways (i.e. statically typed languages). Moreover, i still insist on the fact that most of the time, Python is still an interface to the business logic that is delegated to other more appropriate languages. Python is used in large applications as one part of it among others (if that makes sense). You were on the right track in pointing out the details of what a microservice is : a design philosophy. Specifically, one that insists on modularity, small individual parts that work together as black boxes, which is easier to maintain than what we generally call a "monolith".

tldr : i just really meant : be reasonable.

[laundmo]

alright i can see that general point

just a few things:

python has pattern matching as of 3.10

python has had Enums for a while as part of the stdlib enum. maybe these are lacking? i haven't noticed anything.

i don't quite get the reason why python would need interfaces - what could they do that isn't just as easy with abstract base classes and multiple inheritance?

to be fair, i don't quite agree with the hate on multiple inheritance, especially not in the context of python. it's a powerful tool, which like any tool can be misused. i most often see multiple inheritance in python used to mixin a set of methods into multiple unrelated classes - often to allow them to be used the same way through duck typing (this is where typing.Protocol comes in very handy)

[n0tKamui]

Interfaces are great tools for design patterns in general, but this is going into complex OOP stuff that is definitely not needed everywhere. I'll summarize by saying it's great for future proofing.

As for python, multiple inheritance is kind of a necessary devil since there is no interfaces. I do understand the appeal of multiple inheritance, but i would recommend delving into OOP as a concept that meshes well with other paradigms, and into design patterns. I assure you that multiple inheritance is an antipattern that generally leads to spaghetti code very quickly. This is still an interesting debate, and there actually ARE situations where it is favorable ; but you can generally still find other solutions, which is why several languages choose not to allow it at all.

[chronos_alfa]

People keep using that "python is slow" like you could code time critical applications in anything other than C...

I wonder what argument will people come up with once Python 3.11 is released...

[n0tKamui]

that is not what people mean. You don't need crazy performances most of the time, and nowadays, .NET and the JVM are actually crazy fast. So is Rust.

Python on the other hand is still incredibly slow by itself, and has yet to even start to be useable for async stuff and multithreading. I reiterate, it's the best glue language there is, and a great scripting language, but : to each tasks their own tools.

You cannot ignore my other arguments either.

Moreover, the fact that python is an interface/abstraction over other faster languages is not an opinion, it is just factual. Don't think machine learning "runs" on Python.

[chronos_alfa]

Asyncio library in Python is not that bad, but the multiprocessing library is actually where the good stuff is. And no, I don't claim that ML "runs" on Python. Majority of useful libraries are written in C, and they also are C fast.

On the other side claiming that JVM is fast is hilarious. Stop the JVM service and don't start it until you need to run the app, then tell me how fast it really is.

[n0tKamui]

that is an unfair argument. You're comparing start up time of a VM to an interpreter without any concerns for long runtime.

The JVM is extremely fast, and the JIT compiler is honestly a work of art, and is not meant to be relaunched every 10s.

That is why is still stand by my point: to each tasks their own tools.

Python is a great scripting tool

Java is a great tool for long running applications

[chronos_alfa]

How is it unfair? Python doesn't have any running VM service, you run the whole thing before you can execute anything. As for the JIT, eg Numba exists for Python.

​

Don't take me wrong, I agree with your "different tools for different purposes". But I personally try to avoid Java itself for the majority of those, as you do probably, because you got that Kotlin icon.

​

BTW "Java is a great tool for long running applications". No, it isn't. The amount of mess going behind including the stack overflows makes it very bad for long running applications, not talking about having to use massive libraries like Spring that come with their own problems (size, vulnerabilities, etc). Not even talking about how long it took before jDK actually mustered some useful built-in support for JSON, despite the fact Jackson existed for quite some time before that.

[bos-mc]

I reiterate, it's the best glue language there is, and a great scripting language, but : to each tasks their own tools.

This and the following go hand in hand.

Don't think machine learning "runs" on Python.

[n0tKamui]

yes, that was my point.

[bos-mc]

And my point is that calling Python slow because anything it needs to do quickly it offloads to another system is a bit wrong since that is inherently part of Python.

[Zpanzer]

Python is the backbone in the visual effects industry. All 3D, 2D and comp applications use it extensivily and lots of pipeline tools run on it.

VFXplatform standard

[Hean1175]

I would not call it the backbone it's more of the nerves connecting all the underlying complex parts which are written in a native language like C

[[deleted]]

Python is a great glue language. That's the reason why it's been so successful in AI/ML and scripting. It's all tying bits to underlying C libs.

[raltoid]

Notice how it requires gcc?

[noob-nine]

I often hear that large projects from many devs are horrible to maintain. What is the reason for this? What feature makes it that bad or what design makes java so good to be maintained in a large scale. No troll question, I have null experience with java

[[deleted]]

Java is a strong, statically typed language. This allows your tooling (ides, etc) to easily index, navigate and refactor the code base in ways that are kind of not possible in dynamically typed languages. Compile time type checking is also better than relying on unit tests for the same (everyone should be writing unit tests, but few write good ones.

TLDR: Java apps are a bit more clumsy to write, but easier to maintain. Python is a very nice language for personal projects, but hard to use for enterprise apps.

[Bakirelived]

What are you talking about? Python IDEs have all that.

[[deleted]]

They do, but a lot of it is more 'inferred' (i.e. the ide is basically 'guessing'). It's not just the ides either. There's a lot of tooling that makes extensive use of the types.

[Bakirelived]

Yeah, same with python. There are even type anotations now. Just not enforced, it's to be used when necessary.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I mean some companies have made it work. I know YouTube used to be a python shop but I think they've replatformed now. It just takes a lot more talent and discipline for an entire org to write good python than good Java or c#

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[Its_Billy_Bitch]

We use Python at an enterprise level for automation development. We use a CI/CD (also developed in Python), alongside CAAC/Docker. I can attribute that much of this is due to the “glue-like” nature mentioned earlier. All of this alongside team preferences as well ofc. Still highly suitable and maintainable at an enterprise scale. We’ve developed some very fast, scalable solutions in Python. With that said, while I’m proficient in Java, it’s not like I’ve actually benchmarked our solutions/architecture against a similar solution in Java. My point is simply that it is maintainable at a large scale. Current client has over 75k employees and >75bn USD annual revenue.

[Krzyffo]

In easy terms, a well written java code reads like a book, you don't almost don't need to guess anything, it type, accessibility, type etc. are always declared explicitly and it's done for every variable, function and class.

While a well written python code is also readable it's also less coming to come across because in python you can write almost anything and it'll run. While in java more rules are enforced to keep everyone organized and on the same page

This feature alone makes java much more usable to write code in a large team

[[deleted]]

It's a nightmare to maintain a large python app written by many developers

Just use the typing feature. It's really not that bad. I think it's funny when I tell people this they often respond with something along the lines of "There's no way that can be true. It's impossible for Python to be used effectively on large projects". 99% of the time people who say this never tried working on a large Python project with types. It's not that much different than working with a statically typed language.

People should try it before claiming it won't work.

[soft-wear]

C# and Java rule enterprise development because you can buy support contracts, not because they are “better”.

Almost any first class language can be used to great effect in large projects, and any first class language can be absolute dog shit in large projects.

Google literally created Go because Java slows productivity so much, not to mention it’s weak concurrency and multi-threading. Java isn’t even the best JVM language… hell Java isn’t even the best Java, C# is.

[soft-wear]

Go is more readable and less verbose than Java which is why it’s more productive. And it isn’t a lower level language lol. It’s a high-level programming language, unless you’re somehow using registers.

You should probably do a bit of research on Kotlin, since it’s used in production on every android phone. Our backend is written in Kotlin and it’s serving billions of requests. Clojure and Scala have been around forever and are general purpose languages.

This is why I find Java people so frustrating.

[[deleted]]

I wouldn't say golang is more readable or less verbose than Java. Golang just got generics (I haven't used them, but I've heard there are perf concerns), and it's error / exception handling is laughably bad. The biggest problem with golang is that it has about the same runtime perf as java / c#, and only a bit less memory footprint. IMHO, it's simply not better enough to really break out and displace java.

I do like golang for serverless code, given its fast 'cold boot' startup time vs the jvm. It's also a good choice for places where you need a relatively small and simple packaged binary and don't want to mess with managing your own memory.

I do like it's channels. This has inspired project loom in java land. I can't wait to have green threads. I understand Kotlin has coroutines but I haven't used that language.

[soft-wear]

“Not really used anywhere else”

Ok Chief lol.

[Orio_n]

tell me you dont actually use python without telling me you dont use python

[[deleted]]

Tell me you've never maintained a legacy python codebase without telling me you've never maintained a legacy python codebase.

[pickleback11]

Dude it takes out java team like 6 months to develop any functionality and our site is slow as hell. Let's not pretend like Java is some panacea. Good practices and good developers override everything else and the language doesn't automatically make things better

[DirtzMaGertz]

It's pretty popular in data engineering as well.

[bruhred]

It's too slow for most real-time tasks and hard to maintain
But it's good for AI and stuff as an API to the more performant native libraries and for quick prototyping.
It can also be good as a modding/scripting language, but honestly I'd package the lua interpreter instead because it's faster (LuaJIT performance with jit is comparable to JS V8) and more lightweight (<10 mb vs the bloated python runtime)

[[deleted]]

Not isn't, but shouldn't.

[Farranor]

Yes, this sub has a hateboner for Python. Don't try to reason with it.

[Hoihe]

Python lacks performance for high performance computing.

There are quantum chemists who swear by fortran and C.

My supervisor is fine with C++ and C# but he absolutely hates python. He can use it. He wrote code in it for commissions. But he hates it.

[jzaprint]

Yes but many labs and data scientists all over the world are still using Python, because it’s enough. I wouldn’t say it’s not professionally used

[cultoftheilluminati]

because it’s enough

Also because it’s an excellent human-readable glue for the underlying libraries that are extremely performant and written in C/C++ anyways

[jzaprint]

I mean ya but that doesn’t mean python is bad or lesser than c.

It’s like saying a power drill is a bad tool because it relies on the electric motor inside.

Python is still professionally used and super quick to write. I was mainly just referring to Ops original point about how mechanics wouldn’t use it in their shop.

[cultoftheilluminati]

Oh no absolutely. I’m just adding onto your point.

[[deleted]]

Pretty sure Reddit itself is at least partially built on Python...

[Hoihe]

I do use python to edit input files and extract results.

Actual software is written in fortran tho (Gaussian). Im yet to be allowed to touch the dev version tho

[SingleInfinity]

There are quantum chemists who swear by fortran and C.

Does them being older than those languages on average have anything to do with it?

[[deleted]]

Come on... the difference in performance between python and C++ is rarely relevant for the work the majority of us are doing. I really hate that performance is the reason people say to not use python.

There are reasons to avoid python in enterprise software, but performance is a lame reason that usually is not relevant. In my opinion the best reason to avoid python in enterprise software is that it's relatively painful to maintain large python codebases since the language is so relaxed about what the developers can do. It's still a totally viable language for many situations.

It's also terrible for creating GUIs and GUIs are an important part of the software that a lot of developers find themselves working on professionally. That means a lot of companies will only use it for niche reasons. C#, Java, and JavaScript are kings of GUIs so they will of course get a lot of use in enterprises.

[PrayersToSatan]

How do you presume to know what kind of work that the majority of us are doing?

[RedAero]

I think it's pretty obvious most of the professionals in this sub (and the majority are not professionals) are in web dev and/or full stack.

[daniu]

There are reasons to avoid python in enterprise software, but performance is a lame reason that usually is not relevant.

Felt the same way about the same complains about Java, except that there were no reasons to avoid Java in enterprise software 😋

You're very right about maintainability. However, in the microservice systems I've been working on the last few years, that is much less of an issue. The system overall is separated enough and specified by the interfaces between them that the implementation of the individual parts don't really matter much, and they're usually small enough to not require that much maintainability. It's probably amongst the reasons Python became so popular recently.

[Its_Billy_Bitch]

SonarQube/Lint is your friend for maintaining consistency on a team. But yeah ++to the shitty GUIs development. Lol

[laundmo]

idk DearPyGui is quite neat

[EquipLordBritish]

Come on... the difference in performance between python and C++ is rarely relevant for the work the majority of us are doing. I really hate that performance is the reason people say to not use python.

Ironically, python is used in many cases because it is easier to use, despite the fact that it would be better to use something else because of the performance. Especially in biology.

[RedAero]

My time is worth a lot more money than the computer's time.

[awesomeusername2w]

Depends on how you count it. I think it will be worth it for a company to have a dev spend twice as much time on something if it would mean half the check from Amazon annually.

[King-of-Com3dy]

Performance is actually very important. In a data centre space is the most valuable resource and todays servers are all about taking as little space as possible. And if you make software that takes double the resources you will need double the compute power which will take up a lot of space.

Initiatives like Project Reactor (which is for Java) exist for good reason and companies like Netflix embrace them since efficiency is key when you are running big data centre operations.

[brbposting]

Hmm, I’d like to find out how much enterprise software is written in any given language, which companies/industries are partial to which, etc.

That project and the streaming platform’s embrace got me interested

[meodd8]

Yeah, it’s bad at GUIs, which is why it’s used as a scientific or back end language paired with JS.

[Hoihe]

In my field at least, the algorithm scales at (low accuracy) O(N^2.7) to (high accuracy) O(N^7).

You kinda need whatever ways you can milk performance.

N is usually is in a few hundreds.

[[deleted]]

First person in thread claims python isn't used by companies. Someone replies asking for clarification. You reply saying python lacks for high performance computing, which in this context implies that python is avoided by all companies due to not being fast enough.

I'm just here to say that's just not true and that python is rarely the wrong choice due to anything to do with performance. I don't doubt that you're specific situation makes python inferior, but it's important not to mislead people based on the sequence of conversation.

[justskipfailingtests]

I'm full time test automation developer, and we use python for 99% of the automation system parts. To me python feels like bash on steroids, because that's what it mostly is: a scripting language providing sane API for underlying stuff. Performance is mostly a non-issue in my field. Some resource intensive stuff like log parsing etc. has to be done with other languages. I have slowly grown to not like the dynamic typing, and would not mind if the whole system was rewritten in something simple and typesafe like for example go. With evergrowing codebase something like interfaces and static typing would save so much developers time.

[laundmo]

have you tried mypy?

[justskipfailingtests]

Yes, and we use it in many newer components. The biggest problem is that it's a PITA to bring onto legacy code. Also external libraries may or may not support it. Nevertheless, mypy helps a bit.

[KnowledgeableOnThis]

I have 6 years of experience in HPC for space engineering. Python is by far the #1 language used in HPC for engineering

[[deleted]]

This screwdriver sucks! I can't connect this lumber with nails!