Question

Back-end of search engine - Java or Python?

Asked by: christophermccann

I thought I would carry on a discussion here that I have been having with some colleagues.

For the development of the back-end of a search engine i.e. the spider and indexer - would you use Java or Python?

Many argue that programmer productivity is greatly increased using Python but lets ignore that metric and focus solely on performance.

Any thoughts from anyone?

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Asked On
2009-10-15 at 13:52:24ID24816390
Tags

Java

,

Python

Topics

Java Programming Language

,

Python Scripting Language

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Answers

 

by: w00tePosted on 2009-10-15 at 14:14:28ID: 25584978

Well there are only really two metrics that matter... the productivity of the programmers and the speed of the completed programming.  

For pretty much anything I've ever looked at Python and Java both can support pretty much anything and everything in the world of languages that's useful (though you may have to be more creative with one than the other depending on the feature you're looking at).  Architecturally they're both solid languages assuming the project is designed appropriately... so if you aren't concerned with how fast the programming can be done (which is Python's best advantage) then you should probably go with Java, because the end result in Java will almost definitely work orders of magnitude faster than the equivalent in Python.  

There are endless comparisons of language efficiency around and though I usually would say they're all biased or flawed, pretty much every one supports Java being much faster than Python.  I only mention that because metrics are useless without proof!

I'm curious about whether anyone else points out a difference in the languages that I've never noticed later in this discussion.  I'm sure they will!

 

by: christophermccannPosted on 2009-10-15 at 14:37:12ID: 25585180

This is my opinion to but many organizations are now using a lot of Python. Personally I have little experience with it - I am a Java developer. I have ran a small number of performance studies and they both tend to be fairly similar in terms of execution time. But these studies also compiled to bytecode so i would expect pre-compiled code to run much faster than Python.

Nevertheless so many organizations - Google, Morgan Stanley, Bing - are using Python more and more.

 

by: w00tePosted on 2009-10-15 at 14:52:41ID: 25585303

Well scripting languages really are amazingly fast in comparison to other languages.  

Between my degrees and my job I've had to use 15+ languages (and I'm not claiming to be a pro at all of them, believe me).  One thing I do know though is I had to use Python/C/Tcl-TK + OpenGL for a project late in my se degree and Python was used for most of the data processing.  It astounded me how quickly I could develop in Python - even when  I was learning it as I went.  

For example, python has a built-in HTML parser that you can modify very lightly and it helps you extract any data you want form a page.  List management and ordering and everything are also so easy, the syntax is a wonderful change.

My favourite language to develop in is without a doubt C#.NET, and its very similar to JAVA in a number of ways... but I have to say - if you're looking to get something done fast and well and you're not worried about the speed gains of a pre-compiled language then I'd have to favour Python/Perl or other scripting languages in this case.

If you haven't used Python enough to see the gain in development efficiency then it's probably hard to understand, maybe you should knock up a sample project and decide for yourself! :)  It is quite an interesting argument after all.

 

by: christophermccannPosted on 2009-10-15 at 14:59:30ID: 25585345

Thanks for your insight.

The speed of development with Python is impressive. I just knocked up a little web spider in a matter of minutes with very little previous experience. Even with expert knowledge of Java it took me longer.

But I do like some of the OOP benefits of Java and C# for that matter. I like being able to have interfaces and abstract classes to allow for re-use.

I have messed around with the Python HTML parser and it is pretty powerful.

But my thoughts are that with a search engine every millisecond counts in performance and therefore Java seems to win out.

 

by: w00tePosted on 2009-10-15 at 15:02:16ID: 25585368

Yeah I'd agree with you.  Java would definitely win due to the performance oriented nature of search engines.  No arguments here :)

 

by: christophermccannPosted on 2009-10-15 at 15:09:48ID: 25585409

Ill leave this open for a few days to see if there are any other opinions out there on this subject.

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