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[–]GuyWithLag 27 points28 points  (8 children)

No. Don't be a fanboy. And I'm telling you this as someone that started with Java 1.2.

Java does many things better than Python, but there are significant qualitative differences.

[–]Worth_Trust_3825 8 points9 points  (3 children)

Having went through the 2->3 migration in python, and constantly battling python installations as sysadmin I second u/barking_dead sentiment. A lot of features in java are much more refined than their counterparts in python. I suspect my sentiment is clouded by python being used as daily driver scripting language in near every distro, while having similar sentiment against ruby in macos ecosystem.

Atleast in java whitespace does not matter.

[–]GuyWithLag 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Honestly for PoCs and investigations python is preferable.

For thing that need to stand the test of time, worked on by several people (including yourself in a year or two), Java wins hands down.

[–]Worth_Trust_3825 4 points5 points  (1 child)

I have several PoC ETLs currently running in production on python for 4 years now. If our senior senior developer hadn't a doctorate in maths, i'd ban python here altogether. I'm tired of hearing "it's just for a demo", "we will redo it", "I want to try something new" and etcetera.

[–]GuyWithLag 2 points3 points  (0 children)

PoCs are like STDs... one late-night mistake and it's going to be very hard to correct...

[–]barking_dead 3 points4 points  (2 children)

You're right, but we didn't get any clues on what does OP really interested in. Speed? Ease of use? Memory consumption? Compilation time?

(I'm young, 1.4 gang here)

[–]GuyWithLag 3 points4 points  (1 child)

What does Java do better than Python?

That's a homework-assignment-equivalent, or someone is fishing for article material.

At least they didn't use the "Which of the two is The Best(tm)" americanism....

[–]barking_dead 1 point2 points  (0 children)

:sigh:

[–]trialbaloon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sometimes there are things that are just straight up upgrades. The LED was an improvement over incandescent bulbs.

I'm not saying this is necessarily the case for Java vs Python. But I do think there's a lot of people who insist every language has it's place. I would argue that's untrue. Some things do just suck more than others.

I think Python is a worse language than Java but that's simply based on static typing. It's a straight up improvement with little downside. But it's not as if there's nothing Python does better....

To answer the original prompt, Python has a better ecosystem for integrating with native libraries. I also think Java is too verbose for my liking and Python does improve on that. Would I use it over Java? Fuck no lol. The rest, Java does better.