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[shevek]

I have yet to read a Java vs python comparison which was written by anyone with any serious enterprise development experience

Comments

[alexmc]

Yes. :-(

[quercus]

I've got the experience of all three.

On the whole, I'd go with Java. This isn't because Java is better, or because Java people are better, but because Java is infinitessimally more robust against lazy code written by average coders. Bad Java is bad Java. It's harder to maintain than bad Python (bad Java tends to be verbose and over complicated, whereas bad Python is over-simple and a bit easier to rework). However bad Java smells worse. There's an awful lot of good practice around in how to run an effective Java shop, even if most of the suits wouldn't recognise it if it bit them. If you have an average team, and some better than average team leads, you can at least judge your product quality. You can know that some new Java is bad, which gives you the chance to fix both the code and its coders. Pair programming works well in Java, I've never seen it work in Python

[rhialto]

The thing with dynamic typing is that it is nice in the occasion you want it, but you don't want it everywhere, all the time. There is lots of code where you can assign some type to your data with certainty. You'd like to express that in the code, if only to aid the reader in understanding what's going on, and to help the compiler to double-check. However, to my knowledge (I'm not a Python expert), Python has no syntax to let you optionally specify the type of your data.

[quercus]

Python has plenty of ability to build statically-typed code, but it's so tedious that you might as well do it in Eiffel. You can't do it by syntax alone, but the check is easy enough with isinstance

[shevek]

While isinstance() is easy, it's also too late. It's like an anti-missile system which detects incoming missiles by the "Wait for bang" method