Why isn't Python king of the hill?

[D-Man]

On Fri, Jun 01, 2001 at 05:52:07AM +0000, Martijn Faassen wrote:
| Geoffrey  Gerrietts <geoff at homegain.com> wrote:

...

| > Now I've answered the questions (I think fairly), but I'd like to
| > take a step back and re-frame my comments.

...

| > When I think about designing a webapp, this is the webapp I think
| > about -- the one I never got to write. For the last year or year
| > and a half, that mental design has been done in Java. In moments
| > of weakness, I think that I could get away with using Jython, but
| > in the end I come back to straight Java. The Java toolkit won't
| > make development any faster, but it does have other compelling
| > features.

...

| > There's a certain draw to being able to take a single webapp and
| > deploy it on any of a dozen different app servers that know how
| > to handle the content, though it's small.
| 
| What do you mean by this, exactly? Are you referring to the whole
| Enterprise JavaBeans framework (sorry if I confuse any of the
| terminology here) that's been implemented by various vendors? I've
| always been skeptical about how well that actually works, but here
| I'm skeptical without any actual real knowledge. :)

I don't have any experience with J2EE either, but I hear the term a
lot in discussions regarding the direction of our products in this
Java shop.

My question for you is :   What about J2EE makes it so great?  What
are the features that you really need/want?  Why not start an
"Enterprise Python" spec, or something, to provide those features in
Python?  If J2EE is the main reason to use Java (excluding the reason
in your next section), then let's take all the good ideas from it and
make them part of Python too.  If Python had "PyEE" then it might be
easier to sell to management <grin>.

| > But the biggest draw is that someone who's proficient with Java is
| > not too hard to find.  Someone who's proficient with Python is
| > considerably harder to lay hands on.

Given the ease of learning Python and the flexibility it offers, I
don't think this a real issue.  As Martijn's examples show, any Java
programmer can learn Python quite easily.  I've also heard many
comments on this list indicating that most of the people who know
python and java like python a lot better than java (myself included).

| > Furthermore, while performance isn't a huge deal to those folks,
| > their app did show signs of growing to cover a lot more terrain.
| > It's conceivable that once the app was turned loose, it really
| > would need to worry about the kind of massive load that starts to
| > show off Python's seams.
| 
| Are Java's seams that much tighter? I know it's faster, on average,
| though it does seem to consume oodles of memory. And then there's the
| question about closing the seams; it would seem to me that this would
| be easier to do in Python in many situations, because it's just a lot
| more flexible.

Finn Bock recently posted on Jython-users some numbers someone else
gave him regarding CPython vs. Jython on JDK 1.4 beta.  

http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/7017/2001/5/0/5834964/

Using PyStone it showed Jython to be quite a bit faster than CPython.
I was surprised, but using Python and Java together might be more
feasible in the near future.

| > I think that part of the issue here is that when I think about a
| > webapp, I don't think about an app that will be written and won't
| > change. I don't think about working on the same app for the rest
| > of my life, or even for more than a couple years. And I think
| > about something that's continually growing, and I plan as if it
| > will be as cool to the rest of the world as I think it is.
| 
| Any larger app will have to grow and change over time, so I consider
| this as well for my Zope/Python/relational database apps, which is
| why I'm interested in your ideas about what makes Java more suitable
| for these purposes. Not so I can go and use Java, but for stealing
| some ideas. :)

:-)  (see above questions regardig J2EE)

| > Meanwhile, I'll build all
| > my administration tools, glue apps, and prototypes in Python. :)
| 
| Good!
| 
| Thanks for the interesting posting,

I found it interesting too.

-D