why python is slower than java?

[Maurice LING]

Dear Terry,
> 
> Not really. It's an impression you could easily get from several
> books about Python (e.g. O'Reilly's "Learning Python"), which
> make a rather big deal about Python being slow to execute, but
> fast to develop in.
> 
Do you have any idea which part of the book or chapter or passage which 
suggests this? Apparently here appears to be a technical fault in the 
book and Alex (in cc) is one of the technical reviewers of "Learning 
Python" and is trying to fix this...

> The reality is that it isn't really all *that* slow to execute,
> and later versions have gotten quite a bit faster.
> 
> But it remains really fast to develop in. ;-)
> 
> The resistence to the idea really stems from a sense of rivalry
> with Java.  Which is really interesting actually, because it
> wasn't all that long ago that Python was "just a scripting
> language" and Java programmers wouldn't feel threatened by it.
> Now they do, I guess. ;-)
> 
> It's quite possible that Java programmers console themselves
> for all the low-level programming work by thinking the result
> will be faster, without really testing to find out.  Certainly
> Java is going to be faster than Jython (Python running on a
> Java platform).
> 
> And I have certainly written some extremely poorly optimized
> Python programs that positively *crawled*.
> 
> Cheers,
> Terry
> 
> --
> Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
> Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com
>