Re: OT: Politics of Java

[Craig Dickson <crdic@pacbell.net>]

Kent West wrote:

> Shaleh was the one to plug python first. But what dman says here gets my 
> attention. Do others concur that python is more cross-platform and more 
> OO than java?

It probably is supported on more platforms, since it's open source. More
OO... hmm. Possibly. Of course, this opens up the whole quagmire of what
it means to be OO. I personally think that OO languages that depend on
inheritance to determine whether a given method is available in an
object are too restrictive. I prefer the Smalltalk or OCAML style of OO,
where if two classes both have a method foo(int), then you can pass either
one to a function such as the following:

    f(x) { x.foo(3); }

Java and C++ won't let you do that unless the two classes are related by
inheritance (either one from the other, or both from a common base class
or interface that defines the foo(int) method). Smalltalk and OCAML
don't care about that; if the method exists, you're fine. You might
think that would require runtime checking, but it's usually possible to
verify it at compile time, and modern compilers will do so.

> What are the disadvantages with python as opposed to java? 

Performance, possibly? I'm not sure how fast python is these days.
Java's JIT compilation helps a lot, and gcc 3.x supports compiling Java
directly to native code (not sure how usable it is yet).

> Why would someone pick java over python then? Is it only because of 
> marketing, as dman says?

Primarily, yes.

Craig