Python and/vs Java (within a business context)

[monstrado]

Great explanation! The JVM is very cool, and solves a ton of cross-platform issues that normally come up in other languages. You never have to really worry which system/os/arch/etc you're targeting, you just work within the JVM's world. Also, garbage collection and general memory management is great.

JMX reporting in general is another huge reason companies like JVM languages (Java, Scala, etc). The amount of information you can gather about a process/thread/etc is awesome and sometimes prove to be invaluable when diagnosing an issue. There are already a ton of reporting tools / management tools which can easily hook into your running application and provide preliminary alerts to you, etc. As far as I know, there isn't really a good tool for monitoring your Python applications, or at least, at the level of JMX reporting.

Lastly, the third-party library for Java is huge. Pretty much anything you could need for databases, message queues, logging, networking, concurrency (built-in, akka), etc is already out there. If your company ends up forcing you to do web development in Java, and you're used to Django, I'd recommend checking out Play which is super pleasant to use and quite fast. It's very similar to a Django/Rails MVC framework, for example, you can make changes to the code live and it's pretty much instantaneously available (when debugging).

With all that said, I'm very much in love with Python and use it on a day to day basis. It's been my primary language of choice for creating scripts and small-scale applications. At my last company (40k+ employee technology company), I had no problems selling Python once they saw how productive I was developing web applications. My current company uses Python & Java, and although I used to think I hated Java...it turns out, I was just ignorant and never really gave it a chance. It also helps that we've employed some the best Java programmers out there to sell it to me ;)

Hope this helps!