Please explain why python rocks...

[Frank Mitchell]

Steve Holden wrote in message <39B7A4D8.97401ED8 at holdenweb.com>...
>Frank Mitchell wrote:
>>
>[snip]
>>
>> Frank
>>
>> P.S. At the risk of starting a flamewar, I do get miffed when people
assume
>> Java == dog slow.
[...]
>There's also a lot of hope with the just-in-time compilation technology.

That, and Hotspot, athough I wasn't impressed with Hotspot 1.0.1.  I didn't
mention them explicitly, but it's mainly what I had in mind.

>The big problem with Java for me is precisely the exponential growth in
>APIs.  I did some experimentation two or three years ago, but now there's
>a LOT to learn, which has meant I personally have left Java alone.


Amen.  Python is *almost* like that, but 1) PSA removes old APIs every so
often, 2) nobody says you have to implement/support them all to be certified
Python(tm), and 3) Python APIs seem a lot less tightly coupled than Java's.

>Programming systems have been consuming more and more
>resources over the last fifty years, usually in the interest of increased
>developer productivity and ease-of-use for the end-user.  Java continues
>this line of development, but I can't help feeling that it's getting to
>be bloatware.
>
>Perhaps I'm getting (too) old...


Me, too, I guess.  Until recently I was working on a servlet-based
application with some CORBA thrown in, and I was stunned when I realized the
resources that the JVM consumed.  Give me something like Eiffel, a
high-level language designed to compile reasonably efficiently to native
code.

Even Python's principle of migrating critical sections to C sounds like a
far better approach than writing everything as bytecode and trying to
squeeze efficiency out of the interpreter (even with JITting and
Hotspotting).

Developers should have all the resources they need to build software, but
end-users shouldn't have to buy equal resources to run that software.

Frank