why python is slower than java?

[Terry Hancock]

On Saturday 06 November 2004 05:44 pm, Maurice LING wrote:
> There is a Chinese saying "waves do not happen without wind." If my 
> impression of Python and Java is flawed, I am seriously wondering where 
> it came from? Is it all due to benchmark data from years ago?

Not really. It's an impression you could easily get from several
books about Python (e.g. O'Reilly's "Learning Python"), which
make a rather big deal about Python being slow to execute, but
fast to develop in.

The reality is that it isn't really all *that* slow to execute,
and later versions have gotten quite a bit faster.

But it remains really fast to develop in. ;-)

The resistence to the idea really stems from a sense of rivalry
with Java.  Which is really interesting actually, because it
wasn't all that long ago that Python was "just a scripting
language" and Java programmers wouldn't feel threatened by it.
Now they do, I guess. ;-)

It's quite possible that Java programmers console themselves
for all the low-level programming work by thinking the result
will be faster, without really testing to find out.  Certainly
Java is going to be faster than Jython (Python running on a
Java platform).

And I have certainly written some extremely poorly optimized
Python programs that positively *crawled*.

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com