History repeats itself

I had to go back and check the date when reading this article. For a moment, I thought I'd found an old article from the nineties. This sounds just like the anti-Java tirade that we used to hear from the C/C++ people. Only now it's Java people getting upset that they're now the ones being displaced.

I was also amazed that in 2008, people still feel that they have to justify the speed of Java. Yes, it's fast enough.

Two quotes really jumped out at me.

Java also enjoys a 10-times performance advantage over interpreted scripting languages like JavaScript, Perl and Python, he said. "The scripting languages aren't JIT-ted yet," he said.

There are two different things called Java that are being blended together and if we're going to make an apples-to-apples comparison, we have to split them apart. We have the Java language and we have the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). They are very different things and yet we tend to pretend they're the same.

In this case, we're comparing the JVM to the runtimes underneath JavaScript, Perl and Python. This is not a language comparison - it's a virtual machine comparison. Since JavaScript and Python (although not Perl) can all run on the JVM, it's a foolish comparison. Does the JVM use a JIT when it's running Java and then turn it off when running Python code? Clearly not.

All the languages mentioned here can run on multiple different virtual machines. Some of those virtual machines have JITs and some don't. The quote above doesn't seem to make any sense in this context.

Scripting languages are ideal for smaller programs but Java is the choice for larger programs, he said. "As your program grows in size, the lack of strong typing basically kills your ability to handle a very large program and so you don't find the million-line Perl program," he said. One-million-line Java programs are plentiful, Click said.

Didn't we give up on the idea of measuring by lines of code a couple of decades ago? So if it takes a million lines of code to write a given application in Java and it only takes 100,000 lines to write that same application in Ruby or Python or Perl, does it somehow magically make the Java version better because there are more lines?

One million lines of Perl (to use his example) would be a truly massive application. It would have significantly more functionality than the equivalent Java application simply because Perl code is very compact compared to Java code.

Now, I wouldn't choose Perl to create a huge application but that decision has nothing to do with the fact that it's dynamically typed. I would have no hesitation recommending Ruby or Smalltalk for something huge and they're both dynamically typed.

Link from James Robertson