this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Anecdotally, Python is about three times as concise as Java. You have to write lots of boilerplate to do anything much more complex than Hello World in Java. And one of the oldest and most reproducible results in software engineering is that the defect rate is proportional to the number of lines of executable code. The more concise the language, the cheaper it is to maintain. This has been measured in hundreds of environments, with dozens of languages, over decades.
Python is slow, though, so there are some situations where it's not a good choice. But those cases are probably less numerous than you might assume. There have been a few occasions where I was told Python would be too slow, I've then built a proof-of-concept, and it was more than fast enough. People suck at knowing where bottlenecks are in complex systems.
And now that the Python project has finally bitten the bullet and taken measures to allow removal of the GIL, things might improve considerably, though Python's dynamic nature and some features of its type inference mean that some things it does will never be ultra-speedy.