Java vs Python

[Darrell Gallion]

"Andrew Cooke" wrote:
> This implies that you have a large project in Python?  What is it?
Rules based text processing. It can do things like fix a broken SGML
document.
The best part is it works and they still use it.

> How big?
>Do you have any metrics to compare the two cases (C++ and Python)?
Only my impressions,  here comes a testimonial.

Don't know how many lines of code and don't work there anymore. Maybe some
of the regular employees who read this list will chime in with some numbers.

Besides as the code got better the number of lines went down. Refactoring at
work.

With a peak of about 4-6 developers, we delivered once cut down to three
developers did a rewrite for a second release all in about 1.5 years. The
second pass included a lot of refactoring, leaving the customer with what I
hope is maintainable code.

I'd guess that the same effort in C++ would require more developers, which
would push out the schedule while they all talk to each other. The schedule
would also be extended because it just takes at least 2-4 times as long to
write C++ applications.

Using C++ the project would have run out of money, and half the team would
be ready to kill the other.

I'm currently helping an embedded C++ project get a handle on testing. (This
is fun because I get to write tools that I dream up) A clean build of the
code for one processor takes 10-15 minutes. Maybe if someone had read "Large
Scale C++ ..." by Lakos the build times and a few other things would be
nicer. Along with "Effective C++",  "More Effective C++", bla, bla. The
story with C++ is " This is very hard, watch out! DANGER! " Most people
won't devote the time required to be good at it, and certainly won't enjoy
it as much as Python.

Python lets you focus more so on the final product.
The benefit of a very high level language.

--Darrell Gallion