Why Python/Jython?

[Cameron Laird]

In article <99dkg301894 at news1.newsguy.com>,
Alex Martelli <aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote:
>"Cameron Laird" <claird at starbase.neosoft.com> wrote in message
>news:1901D50DC30D30E4.16551C1AB0FB4363.C0D72E208759F8A7 at lp.airnews.net...
>    [snip]
>>     meaningful.  People do NOT start learning
>>     Java lightly; it often takes hours just to
>>     install and configure a minimal JDK, let
>
>*blink* -- I'm hardly a Java-ite, myself, but
>"install and configure a minimal JDK" I would
>estimate as typically a 10-minute job (on, say,
>NT -- is it an order of magnitude harder on,
>say, Linux?!).  Maybe I misunderstand what
>you mean...?
>
>I'll underwrite the rest of your post (haven't
>had occasion to use Jython 'in anger', yet, but
>from just playing with it it does seem a great
>way to exploit the huge libraries available in
>and for Java), but this point seems strange.
>
>
>Alex
>
>
>

As Andrew mentioned nearby, as confusing as it can be for
a newcomer to Python to figure out who and where the players
are, Java manages to dwarf this.  Java is MUCH less compat-
ible between versions, Java downloads are much, MUCH bigger,
and Sun makes it (unless something's changed recently) a
serious nuisance to locate binaries for anything other than
Win*.  Those little annoyances do indeed multiply out to an
order of magnitude, in many common situations ("Oh, you only
have 128 Mb of main memory?  Too bad; start over.") (my main
machine continues to do fine with 32 Mb, by the way).
-- 

Cameron Laird <claird at NeoSoft.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html