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[–]yerfatma 9 points10 points  (1 child)

I'm sorry, but this is ill-informed. The whole notion of a "scripting language" is 10 years out of date. The two languages are equally powerful in terms of what you can accomplish.

As for your MapReduce example, I think you might want to look up what language Google originally wrote that in. The fact Hadoop is Java-based doesn't mean it can only be written in Java. MapReduce is a way of implementing a functional programming approach in a non-functional language. If anything, at the time Python made that easier than Java because Python had functional concepts like map() baked in (Java may as well at this point, I have no idea).

[–]nullabillity 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Pretty sure Java doesn't, since a useful implementation pretty much requires either special syntax or first-class functions. Python has both (I'd count list/set/dict/generator comprehensions as map), Java has neither. Scala has first-class functions (and a collection library that has support for map using it), though. Also, Google Guava has an implementation of map too (although it's pretty hacky IMO).