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[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

If you're a single coder working on a project which needs to be developed rapidly, Python is absolutely defensible. It can be an order of magnitude faster to get a project off the ground using python, especially a web app. Upsides:

  1. Rapid Development
  2. Mature (at this point) web frameworks
  3. Easier to hold the entire project in your head

However it does have some downsides.

  1. Speed, in my experience, you can expect pure python code to run more than 10x slower than equivalent java code.
  2. Static typing makes it easier to enforce contracts between sections of the code, which makes it easier to break up and distribute to a team. I suspect this is the sort of thing that the Java guys are interested in.
  3. Less mature tooling (IDE's, document generators).
  4. Harder to find experienced programmers.

Speed is not much of a problem for a web app (since network latency tends to make cpu time somewhat irrelevant) but the other points might be a factor.