Re: [Tutor] How it is better than java
On 19/09/11 14:27, Ashish Gaonker wrote: First, to address the question in your subject line, we need to agree a definition of better. In what respect? And by which benchmark? And who claimed that either one was better anyway? No serious programmer would be likely to make such a vague comparison. My obvious thinking is : Java being compiled language , must be faster then a interpreted language. There have been many other answers that address this. Suffice to say it is fallacious both factually and in principle. I know couple of points : Development time is less + easy to learn + python is expressive. These are all different dimensions of betterness. Which aspect is important to you? There are no perfect languages. Can you share some more especially as compared to Java / .net (two primarily used languages in enterprise language web based applications) .Net is not a lanuage it is a programming environment which supports multiple languages, but all of them working on the compile to bytecode then run in an interpreter model that Python mostly uses. Apart from trolling the list what do you hope to gain from this post? Do you have some objective, such as persuading a boss to allow you use Python instead of Java/.Net? Are you looking for justification to yourself to learn Python? (In that case forget everything else and just learn it for the different approaches and constructs it takes - like any other new language. Learning new languages will always benefit your programming by exposing new idioms.) HTH, -- Alan G Just back from an internet free vacation :-) ___ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
Re: [Tutor] How it is better than java
Alan Gauld wrote: Apart from trolling the list what do you hope to gain from this post? Be fair -- there's no evidence that Ashish Gaonker was insincere about his question or trying to stir up trouble. It is a very common misapprehension that language Foo is faster than language Bar, and in practice, Java programs often are faster than the equivalent Python program. That's a quality of implementation issue rather than a language issue: Python hasn't had the millions of dollars of development that Java has had. But I bet I could write a Java compiler that was slower than Python, easy! wink -- Steven ___ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
Re: [Tutor] How it is better than java
Mac Ryan wrote: On Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:27:12 +1000 Steven D'Aprano st...@pearwood.info wrote: There are three misunderstandings with that statement. [snip] There's also JPype, which claims to give full access to Java libraries in Python. Now: this was one of the best write-ups on the subject I read. Concise, clear, documented. Nice way to start the day! :o I'm glad it was helpful and interesting. Thank you to everyone for the kind words. -- Steven ___ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
Re: [Tutor] How it is better than java
On Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:27:12 +1000 Steven D'Aprano st...@pearwood.info wrote: There are three misunderstandings with that statement. [snip] There's also JPype, which claims to give full access to Java libraries in Python. Now: this was one of the best write-ups on the subject I read. Concise, clear, documented. Nice way to start the day! :o /mac ___ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
Re: [Tutor] How it is better than java
On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 3:21 AM, Mac Ryan quasipe...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:27:12 +1000 Steven D'Aprano st...@pearwood.info wrote: There are three misunderstandings with that statement. [snip] There's also JPype, which claims to give full access to Java libraries in Python. Now: this was one of the best write-ups on the subject I read. Concise, clear, documented. Nice way to start the day! :o Ditto - and as a slight aside, it's interesting to note that .NET languages (VB, C# specifically) are also compiled into the MSIL which can't run without the .NET runtime. To my understanding, this is quite similar (or the same thing) as other interpreted languages. -Wayne ___ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
[Tutor] How it is better than java
My obvious thinking is : Java being compiled language , must be faster then a interpreted language. I know couple of points : Development time is less + easy to learn + python is expressive. Can you share some more especially as compared to Java / .net (two primarily used languages in enterprise language web based applications) -- Thanks Regards Ashish Gaonker ___ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
Re: [Tutor] How it is better than java
On 2011/09/19 03:27 PM, Ashish Gaonker wrote: My obvious thinking is : Java being compiled language , must be faster then a interpreted language. I know couple of points : Development time is less + easy to learn + python is expressive. Can you share some more especially as compared to Java / .net (two primarily used languages in enterprise language web based applications) -- Thanks Regards Ashish Gaonker ___ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor I would suggest reading `Python is not Java` [1] and `Java is not Python, either` [2], old but good reads. And then ask what is your focus for development. Better is extremely subjective and can be liable to induce flame-wars, although this list is quite friendly. To me, I started using Python as a glue language, controlling process flows and the like, with still heavy uses of C and PL/SQL for what I do. Over time Python has taken center-stage for my projects due to ease-of-use and rapid application development and only moving time critical work that needs to be faster to C but in most cases that is not needed for me anymore. Add to that the great work on PyPy [3] which is extremely efficient, I hardly ever have to write in another language if I don't wish. [1] http://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/python-is-not-java.html [2] http://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/java-is-not-python-either.html [3] http://pypy.org/ -- Christian Witts Python Developer // ___ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
Re: [Tutor] How it is better than java
Hi Ashish, On 19 September 2011 14:27, Ashish Gaonker ashish@gmail.com wrote: My obvious thinking is : Java being compiled language , must be faster then a interpreted language. I know couple of points : Development time is less + easy to learn + python is expressive. Can you share some more especially as compared to Java / .net (two primarily used languages in enterprise language web based applications) There's many pages on the internet comparing Python, Java and other languages. I suggest you check them out. Having said that, I'll point out that Python has several implementations, including one called Jython, which actually targets the Java runtime and so should have comparable performance to Java on the same runtime. Additionally there's projects like PyPy which in some cases is faster even than C/C++. This page (from my bookmarks) has some interesting points of comparison for consideration: http://pythonconquerstheuniverse.wordpress.com/category/java-and-python/ Walter ___ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
Re: [Tutor] How it is better than java
Ashish Gaonker wrote: My obvious thinking is : Java being compiled language , must be faster then a interpreted language. There are three misunderstandings with that statement. Firstly: Languages are neither compiled or interpreted. Languages are syntax and grammar. Implementations are either compiled, or interpreted, or both: for example, there are C interpreters and C compilers. And the quality of both can vary significantly. Asking which language is faster is like asking which is faster, Ford or Toyota? That depends on the particular model, and the conditions, and the skill of the driver. It is ironic that you contrast Java as compiled and Python as interpreted, because that is *marketing*. When Java first came out, Sun didn't want people describing it as interpreted, which it was, so they popularized the term byte-code compiler just so that they could talk about Java being compiled. Java would compile your Java source code to byte-code which was then interpreted by a virtual machine. That is *exactly* what Python does: it compiles Python source code to byte-code which is interpreted by a virtual machine, just like Java. What do you think the .pyc files contain, and what the compile() function does? And yet, even back in the 1980s, everybody swallowed Sun's marketing and called Java a compiled language and Python an interpreted language. This is a testament to Sun spending millions in advertising. Byte-code compilation is a lot older than Java. Pascal used something similar in the early 1970s, called a p-machine. Even Apple's Hypertalk did the same thing, only they called it tokenized code instead of compiled. Java's big innovation was to convince people to use the term compiler for what was functionally identical to an interpreter. Of course, Sun (now owned by Oracle) put in a lot of money into Java. Millions. Today, Java does have implementations which compile source code to machine code. But there are Python implementations that do the same, such as Nuitka and Compyler. (I don't know how successful or good they are.) Secondly, what do you mean by faster? Faster to write? Faster to compile? Faster to run? Faster for the engine to start up? Even today, after Sun has spent tens of millions on Java development, the Java Runtime Environment is a big, heavyweight machine that takes a long time to start up: cold starts can easily take 30 seconds. That makes Java completely unsuitable for small, lightweight tasks: in the time it takes for a *single* Java program just to start up, you could possibly run a dozen Python programs or a hundred interpreted bash scripts. But again, that's an *implementation*, not a hard rule about Java. There is at least one third-party JRE which claims to have startup times twice as fast as the Sun/Oracle JRE. Either way, once you take startup time into account, sometimes Python scripts are not only faster to write and faster to maintain, but faster to run as well. Thirdly, there is no rule of nature that a compiled program to do a job must be faster than an interpreted program to do the same thing. This depends entirely on the quality of implementation of both: a poor compiler may easily generate bad, slow code that takes longer to run than a wickedly fast and efficient interpreter. E.g. a compiled version of bubblesort will still be slower than an interpreted version of quicksort. Nothing drives this home more than PyPy, a Just In Time optimizing version of Python. PyPy uses a JIT compiler to run code sometimes FASTER than the equivalent program in optimized C. Yes. Faster than C. You read that right. http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2008/01/rpython-can-be-faster-than-c.html http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/02/pypy-faster-than-c-on-carefully-crafted.html http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/08/pypy-is-faster-than-c-again-string.html Of course, benchmarks are notoriously flawed, especially micro- benchmarks. What they *really* answer is not which language is faster? (a nonsense question, as I have tried to explain) but which implementation is faster with these particular settings on this particular task?, a much more practical question. As exciting as it is to see Python code run faster than C code, it shouldn't really surprise anyone that a JIT dynamic compiler with cross module optimization beats a static compiler without it. What *is* surprising is that a small group of open-source developers have been able to build an optimizing JIT compiler for Python of such quality. Or at least, it is surprising to people who think that quality code can only come from big proprietary companies with huge budgets. What's really exciting though is that now PyPy can be fast enough for large programs that traditionally needed to be written in C can now be (sometimes!) written in Python: http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/07/realtime-image-processing-in-python.html Who cares whether Java, or C, is faster
