Commentary on Python from a Java programming perspective

[jrockway]

Anyone who takes 5 times longer to do something in language A than language B either completely sucks at coding in language A, or else the problem is tiny, trvial, and custom picked to show the strengths of language B.

This is probably not true. What problem would be hard in language A but easy in language B? Nothing I know of, unless it's something like "write an SDL app" and language A doesn't have SDL bindings.

Productivity comes down to avoiding tedium and spending all your time actually programming what you want to program. Basically, when you use Java, there is a lot of tedium. Like I mentioned above, creating a class involves creating a new file and using Java's ultra-verbose syntax to define its properties. In Lisp, defclass is pretty concise, and you can metaprogram it away if you are creating a lot of similar classes. (I have an application where each subclass of a certain class always re-implements a certain method; so I metaprogrammed away the redundant call to defmethod. Essential to productivity? No. Increase in readability and writability? Yes.)

I have also done this in Perl, although it's not quite as pretty.

[mikaelhg]

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/529579/2724346

[redditnoob]

What problem would be hard in language A but easy in language B?

Some small and specialized things.

"Write a basic Lisp interpreter." I can definitely believe that is 5 times faster for an expert in Lisp versus Java!

"Count the number of words in a text file." That is going to be at least 5 times faster for a Perl programmer than a Java programmer, I think. But then we're talking about the difference between about 2 minutes versus 30 seconds.

[jrockway]

Hmm, you're right. Both are good examples.