On Feb 25, 8:29 am, Nicola Musatti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > And the migration to Python is due in large part because of an > > additional factor of 3-4x in personal productivity (over Java). > > Improvements in runtime performance wouldn't hurt, but for many > > applications that's not an issue. (If optional data typing were > > offered, Python's penetration in the enterprise space would be even > > higher, and I suspect there would be performance gains as well.) > > This I found less hard to believe. Python is more expressive than Java > and usually requires less code for the same task. Moreover the > availability of libraries is comparable.
I tend to cheat when I code in java and pretend I'm writing in Python. But even then the biggest pain comes in when I try to use really advanced data structures and get all knotted up in the verbosity -- and when I try to figure out what I was doing later it's even worse. For example in Python I tend to build things like dictionaries of tuples to lists of dictionaries without thinking about it, but in Java the equivalent of D[ (x,y) ] = [ { a: b } ] is too horrible to be imagined, even if you cheat and use the non-type-safe containers. Of course this is in addition to other Java annoyances like no proper support for multivalued returns or function pointers, and overgeneralized libraries. However, I have found in the corporate environment that managers frequently don't like it when you do in a few days that things that they themselves don't know how to do in less than several months. Especially when it makes the other programmers angry. Sometimes I think programmers should get sociology/psychology/poli.sci degrees and pick up the programming stuff on the job, since most of what counts seems to be politics, really. -- Aaron Watters === http://www.xfeedme.com/nucular/pydistro.py/go?FREETEXT=spam+eggs -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list