From my perspective, choosing Python over Java (on Linux) around 2001: It was easy to find benchmarks showing that Java was fast. But Java turned out to be slo

From my perspective, choosing Python over Java (on Linux) around 2001: It was easy to find benchmarks showing that Java was fast. But Java turned out to be slower in every situation we might consider using it. Command-line applications were slower because the JVM took ages to start. GUI applications were slower, apparently because Python would use C-implemented widgets while Java would do much of the drawing itself. Web applications were slower without any good excuse as far as I could see, but something in the application server that was the mainstream way of doing things added more per-request overhead than starting a whole new Python interpreter via CGI. CPU-intensive operations (I remember image resizing in particular) were slower because, again, you ended up comparing the JVM against a well-written C extension.