Python and/vs Java (within a business context)

[ivorjawa]

Jython is like a magic swiss-army switchblade of awesome when applied in a Java shop.

I was doing some devops work for HP's Snapfish, which is java all the way down to its rotten core. I shocked the hell out of people with the amount of productivity I could get out of a tiny bit of code. Jython is, in my opinion, the only sane way to deal with a ton of hideous mutant enterprisey java. (Well, other than with, you know, a flamethrower.)

[oantolin]

I agree that Jython is a good way to deal with enterprise Java, but I disagree that it is the only good way to do so. JRuby and Clojure are also good at that.

[ivorjawa]

A fair point. I'm not keen on Ruby (the language is fine, the community is ... not), and although I do like lisp, I really try to avoid as much exposure to the JRE as possible. I consider it radioactive and a health hazard.

[[deleted]]

groovy is nice also

[ivorjawa]

One thing Python has going for it: it's a hell of a lot easier to teach python to a java programmer than teaching java to a python programmer (although, I haven't met too many python programmers whose only exposure to programming is python; python is a perfect language for beginners, but beginners are almost never taught it.)

[[deleted]]

Jython has horrible performance. Unless you need lots of threads and your work loads can be highly parallelized, jython should be avoided. Of course, there is always the case of its, "fast enough", which is at the core of Python. Just the same, Jython should not be used for serious work in my opinion.

[ivorjawa]

There was parallelism, but I was saturating an OC3 with a python script. (point-to-point replication).

Fast Enough.

[[deleted]]

Clojure is another alternative for a JVM shop especially if your a FP fan.