Java vs Python

[Robb Shecter]

> >Marketability?  Hm.  The thing that makes Java marketable is
> >the tremendous amount of money that Sun has poured into
> >getting it into every trade rag that they could possibly
> >find. ... is there any way we can effectively market Python as a
> >competitor to a language / platform with that kind of
> >agressive force behind it?...

I don't this does justice to the Java idea.  Java has the design goal
of hiding -all- system dependencies.  And, features that are dependent
on certain operating systems are clearly seperate from the standard
Java packages.

Python seems to go about half-way in this direction.  Some libraries
seem to hide OS differences via an adapter sort of design, but there
are many standard libraries that are purely only for certain types of
systems.   Not that this is bad, it's just different.

I use Python for 90% of my new projects.  (I work only on Linux.)
But, if I know that the software has to run on, say Linux and NT, then
I'll use Java.  I've seen, first hand, successful cases of "porting" a
Java program that was written on Linux to NT by just copying the class
files.

- Robb