python vs. java, slight reprise (from sun, no less)

[Gerson Kurz]

"A study performed by an outside team appears to indicate a rough
parity in performance between Java and a common implementation of
another OO language called Python (see IEEE Computing, October 2000,
"An Empirical Comparison of Seven Programming Languages" by Lutz
Prechelt of the University of Karlsruhe). Both platforms are Object
Oriented, support web applications, serialization, internet
connections and native interfaces. The key difference is that Python
is a scripting language. This means there is no compilation to byte
code so the Python runtime environment has to do two things in
addition to what the Java runtime environment does. It has to perform
syntax checks and it must parse the ascii text provided by the
programmer. Both of those tasks are performed at compile time by Java
and so that capability does not have to be in the JRE.
Given this data, it appears that the JRE can actually be simpler than
the Python RE since Java does at least some of this work at compile
time. The example above of "Hello World" is a good method for getting
an idea of the minimum support code required at runtime. This support
code includes garbage collector, byte code interpreter, exception
processor and the like. Hello World written in Java2 requires 9M for
this most basic support infrastructure. By comparison, this is
slightly larger than automountd on Solaris8. The Python runtime
required to execute Hello World is roughly 1.6M."

from http://www.internalmemos.com/memos/memodetails.php?memo_id=1321

which is a great read for old pythonistas and javabashers like I am ;)