Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 31st Aug 2007 19:17 UTC, submitted by ganges master
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Member since:
2005-07-06
For web applications, I would probably prefer Java in most cases for performance reasons. On the other hand, sometimes there are more than speed to consider. With tools like Plone and Zope very advanced web functionality can be created without even touching the Python that supplies the functionality in the background.
Python is still a very nice language though. I'm not saying that big companies won't use python. What I'm saying is that they wont use python 3.0 They will stay with the 2.x branch for as long as possible, making much of the new nice stuff sort of wasted..
Just compare the Python situation with that of Java. In the java case, 10 years old, or older java classes runs well on the latest java 6. But even so most people still use jdk1.4, people are afraid to upgrade even though java 6 is a completely different animal with respect to speed and ease of development than jdk1.4, so in reality there is very little reason not to upgrade. Still they don't. So, What do you think will happen to python where backward compatibility is broken deliberately.
IMHO, having just one branch, where you try to be backward compatible for say at least 10 years but evolve without breaking old things is a better way to introduce new things. That way more daring developers have a better chance to influence old conservative ones with a "if it worked for grand dad it works for me" attitude.