Elixir vs Java vs Python

Overview

Python

Stacks262.9K

Followers205.4K

Votes6.9K

GitHub Stars69.7K

Forks33.3K

Java

Stacks148.0K

Followers105.5K

Votes3.7K

Elixir

Stacks3.5K

Followers3.3K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars26.0K

Forks3.5K

Elixir vs Java vs Python: What are the differences?

Introduction: When comparing Elixir, Java, and Python, there are key differences that define each language's strengths and weaknesses.

Performance: Elixir, being built on the Erlang virtual machine, is highly optimized for concurrency and distributed computing, making it a better choice for handling large-scale systems compared to Java and Python. Java also focuses on performance with its Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation, but Python, due to its interpreted nature, tends to be slower in terms of execution speed.
Concurrency Model: Elixir excels in handling concurrency with its lightweight processes, which perform better than traditional threads in Java. Python, on the other hand, has Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) limitations, making it less efficient when dealing with concurrent tasks compared to Elixir and Java, which both allow for true parallel processing.
Syntax and Paradigm: Elixir, being a functional language, promotes immutability and pure functions, making it easier to reason about and write robust, bug-free code. In contrast, Java is primarily an object-oriented language with imperative features, while Python supports multiple paradigms, including object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming.
Community and Libraries: Java has a vast ecosystem of libraries and frameworks due to its long-standing presence in the industry, making it ideal for enterprise applications and large-scale projects. Python also has a strong community and extensive library support, particularly in data science and web development, but Elixir's community focuses more on building scalable, fault-tolerant systems.

In Summary, the key differences between Elixir, Java, and Python lie in performance optimization, concurrency handling, programming paradigms, and community support.

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Advice on Python, Java, Elixir

Thomas

Talent Co-Ordinator at Tessian

Mar 11, 2020

Decided

In December we successfully flipped around half a billion monthly API requests from our Ruby on Rails application to some new Python 3 applications. Our Head of Engineering has written a great article as to why we decided to transition from Ruby on Rails to Python 3! Read more about it in the link below.

263k views263k

Comments

Nick

Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream

Sep 5, 2019

Review

I work at Stream and I'm immensely proud of what our team is working on here at the company. Most recently, we announced our Android SDK accompanied by an extensive tutorial for Java and Kotlin. The tutorial covers just about everything you need to know when it comes to using our Android SDK for Stream Chat. The Android SDK touches many features offered by Stream Chat – more specifically, typing status, read state, file uploads, threads, reactions, editing messages, and commands. Head over to https://getstream.io/tutorials/android-chat/ and give it a whirl!

176k views176k

Comments

Ido

Mar 6, 2020

Decided

When developing a new blockchain, we as a team chose Go lang over Java and other candidates, due to Go being (a) natively suited to concurrency - there are primitives in the language itself (goroutines, channels) that really help with reasoning about concurrency (b) super fast - build time, running, testing are all much faster that Java, this gives a far superior developer experience (c) shorter and stricter than Java - code is much shorter (less verbose), and there is usually one good way to do things, and even the code formatter that is bundled with Go is very opinionated - over a short time this makes reading other people's code far smoother than having to deal with different styles.

You should be aware that Go presently (v1.13) lacks Generics.

267k views267k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Python	Java	Elixir
Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.	Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!	Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 69.7K	GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 26.0K
GitHub Forks 33.3K	GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 3.5K
Stacks 262.9K	Stacks 148.0K	Stacks 3.5K
Followers 205.4K	Followers 105.5K	Followers 3.3K
Votes 6.9K	Votes 3.7K	Votes 1.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros 1186 Great libraries 966 Readable code 848 Beautiful code 789 Rapid development 692 Large community Cons 53 Still divided between python 2 and python 3 28 Performance impact 26 Poor syntax for anonymous functions 22 GIL 20 Package management is a mess	Pros 608 Great libraries 446 Widely used 401 Excellent tooling 396 Huge amount of documentation available 334 Large pool of developers available Cons 33 Verbosity 27 NullpointerException 17 Nightmare to Write 16 Overcomplexity is praised in community culture 12 Boiler plate code	Pros 174 Concurrency 163 Functional 133 Erlang vm 113 Great documentation 105 Great tooling Cons 11 Fewer jobs for Elixir experts 7 Smaller userbase than other mainstream languages 5 Elixir's dot notation less readable ("object": 1st arg) 4 Dynamic typing 2 Difficult to understand
Integrations
Django	Spring	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Python, Java, Elixir?

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Swift

Writing code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and apps run lightning-fast. Swift is ready for your next iOS and OS X project — or for addition into your current app — because Swift code works side-by-side with Objective-C.

Rust

Rust is a systems programming language that combines strong compile-time correctness guarantees with fast performance. It improves upon the ideas of other systems languages like C++ by providing guaranteed memory safety (no crashes, no data races) and complete control over the lifecycle of memory.

Clojure

Clojure is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system.

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Elixir vs Java vs Python: What are the differences?

Introduction: When comparing Elixir, Java, and Python, there are key differences that define each language's strengths and weaknesses.

Performance: Elixir, being built on the Erlang virtual machine, is highly optimized for concurrency and distributed computing, making it a better choice for handling large-scale systems compared to Java and Python. Java also focuses on performance with its Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation, but Python, due to its interpreted nature, tends to be slower in terms of execution speed.
Concurrency Model: Elixir excels in handling concurrency with its lightweight processes, which perform better than traditional threads in Java. Python, on the other hand, has Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) limitations, making it less efficient when dealing with concurrent tasks compared to Elixir and Java, which both allow for true parallel processing.
Syntax and Paradigm: Elixir, being a functional language, promotes immutability and pure functions, making it easier to reason about and write robust, bug-free code. In contrast, Java is primarily an object-oriented language with imperative features, while Python supports multiple paradigms, including object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming.
Community and Libraries: Java has a vast ecosystem of libraries and frameworks due to its long-standing presence in the industry, making it ideal for enterprise applications and large-scale projects. Python also has a strong community and extensive library support, particularly in data science and web development, but Elixir's community focuses more on building scalable, fault-tolerant systems.

In Summary, the key differences between Elixir, Java, and Python lie in performance optimization, concurrency handling, programming paradigms, and community support.