[OT-Slightly] Sun Micro engineers bashing Java, and mentioning Python even Eiffel

[Adonis]

I do not know if this was ever posted on here but check this Sun Micro 
internal memo out:

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

Here is the paragraph where it is mentioned:

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.

Adonis