Java vs Python

[Robb Shecter]

Courageous wrote:

> > 1. Which is more maintainable ?
>
> Python. No comparison.

I wonder about this.  Python is much more maintainable in a practical way,
because of the interpreter and reflective language features.  A good Java IDE
like IBM Visual Age can make up for most of that, though.

The other issue is that Java is statically typed, and has the "interface"
feature for clearly specifying an API.  Since it's statically typed,
excellent hyperlinked API can be automatically generated that tells client
programmers all they need to know about how to use a library.  Python's docs
are also very good, but they're put together by hand, and occasionally lack
details like the return value of a method, or a list of what exceptions it
throws.  This affects maintainability.

So, this doesn't have so much to do with Python vs. Java per se, but the
maintainability of a statically vs. dynamically typed language.

- Robb