Could Python supplant Java?

[brueckd at tbye.com]

On 21 Aug 2002, Paul Rubin wrote:

> > Obviously the 10,000 line thing is just a generalisation, a 
> > shorthand if you like.  There can be thousand line programs 
> > which are actually quite simplistic, and there can be 10 line 
> > programs which are as complicated as hell (most of them written 
> > in Perl, for some strange reason :-)
> 
> Python hasn't been used for many big programs mainly because of its
> slow interpreter and its history as a script language.

I'd agree that its history as a scripting language has led some to pass on
Python for big programs (i.e. - it's a perception problem), but I haven't
encountered first-hand any cases where "Python's slow interpreter" was to
blame, much less enough cases to make such a sweeping conclusion. Have
you? Or is this just conjecture?

I'd be very interested in hearing about a large project that really
considered Python but passed due to interpreter speed. Maybe my personal
background is tainting my perspective because all the medium-to-large
projects I've been involved with are in the domain of business
applications, but regardless of the implementation language most weren't
even that performance bound and the ones that were tended to be bound by
memory, database, or network long before CPU.

-Dave