Performance java vs. python

[Sion Arrowsmith]

Duncan Booth  <duncan.booth at suttoncourtenay.org.uk> wrote:
>namekuseijin <namekuseijin at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I find it completely unimaginable that people would even think 
>> suggesting the idea that Java is simpler.  It's one of the most stupidly 
>> verbose and cranky languages out there, to the point you can't really do 
>> anything of relevance without an IDE automatically pumping out lots of 
>> scaffold code for you.
>But that means Java programmers are obviously more productive than Python 
>programmers: they produce many more lines of code per day even if much of 
>it is boileplate or even automatically generated. Managers like that.
>
>OTOH, I consider it a productive day if I end up with fewer lines of code 
>than I started with.

A friend once justified a negative LOC count as being the sign of a
good day with the following observation:

Code that doesn't exist contains no bugs.
Code that doesn't exist takes no time to execute.
Code that doesn't exist takes up no space.
Code that doesn't exist doesn't need maintenance.

Once, when faced with a rather hairy problem that client requirements
dictated a pure Java solution for, I coded up a fully functional
prototype in Python to get the logic sorted out, and then translated
it. Even given the optimisations of manual translation, and being
able to dispose of one portion of the Python which Java supplied the
functionality for out of the box (thread timeout, I think it was),
the code grew by 200%. That was a very unproductive day.

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