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The biggest thing for me is that the tooling around Java makes maintaining large projects extremely easy. Being able to refactor hundreds of files in a few keys

The biggest thing for me is that the tooling around Java makes maintaining large projects extremely easy. Being able to refactor hundreds of files in a few keystrokes without worry lets me sleep well at night. It's certainly a lot faster to get up and running with a dynamic language, but the initial build out is a small percentage of the overall time you are going to spend with a codebase. I've also built just about everything in Java from HFT algos, to an exchange, to a web server, to thick clients so I have an idea in my mind about how to solve any new problem that comes up.

pimlottc 12y ago
I think this is the key point in the debate - weighing initial development time against ongoing development and maintenance. It's something that's hard to grasp until you've been around for a while working on real-world large-scale projects. And it's a hard thing to get the sense of when you're in school, writing throwaway code that doesn't last past the end of the semester. When you understand this, then you can make an honest assessment - is it really important to get the first build out that much quicker? Sometimes it is. But I think it's overemphasized. The first one to market doesn't always win. And the shift from new development to maintenance happens quicker than you might think.
- hvidgaard 12y ago
  First to market has never ever been about using a dynamically typed language. Getting the ideas from talk to concepts, testing, bugfixing and marketing takes vastly more time than actually developing the code. So while Python might enable me to show my prototype on Monday, while that Java version wouldn't be seen until Friday, there still is quite a lot of time before you can say it's properly released. Where these "fast" to develop languages shines are throwaway prototypes. For some people their ideas flow out much faster with dynamically typed language. But it is all too well known that even though the manager said you could throw it away, they change their mind because "it's basically finished, right?". That said, you are spot on. Initial development is likely not where you want to focus at all, for any kind of project that needs to be maintained for more than a few months.

pimlottc 12y ago

I think this is the key point in the debate - weighing initial development time against ongoing development and maintenance. It's something that's hard to grasp until you've been around for a while working on real-world large-scale projects. And it's a hard thing to get the sense of when you're in school, writing throwaway code that doesn't last past the end of the semester. When you understand this, then you can make an honest assessment - is it really important to get the first build out that much quicker? Sometimes it is. But I think it's overemphasized. The first one to market doesn't always win. And the shift from new development to maintenance happens quicker than you might think.

hvidgaard 12y ago
First to market has never ever been about using a dynamically typed language. Getting the ideas from talk to concepts, testing, bugfixing and marketing takes vastly more time than actually developing the code. So while Python might enable me to show my prototype on Monday, while that Java version wouldn't be seen until Friday, there still is quite a lot of time before you can say it's properly released. Where these "fast" to develop languages shines are throwaway prototypes. For some people their ideas flow out much faster with dynamically typed language. But it is all too well known that even though the manager said you could throw it away, they change their mind because "it's basically finished, right?". That said, you are spot on. Initial development is likely not where you want to focus at all, for any kind of project that needs to be maintained for more than a few months.