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  5. COBOL vs Java vs Python

COBOL vs Java vs Python

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Python
Python
Stacks262.8K
Followers205.4K
Votes6.9K
GitHub Stars69.7K
Forks33.3K
Java
Java
Stacks148.0K
Followers105.5K
Votes3.7K
COBOL
COBOL
Stacks130
Followers147
Votes2

COBOL vs Java vs Python: What are the differences?

# Introduction
Here we will discuss the key differences between COBOL and Java and Python.

1. **Syntax**: COBOL follows a more verbose and English-like syntax compared to Java and Python, which have more concise and readable syntax.
2. **Usage**: COBOL is primarily used for business data processing, while Java and Python are more versatile and commonly used in web development, data science, and various other domains.
3. **Platform**: COBOL is initially designed for mainframes, while Java and Python can run on multiple platforms including PCs, servers, and mobile devices.
4. **Community and Support**: Java and Python have large and active communities with abundant resources online, whereas COBOL has a smaller community which can make finding help and resources more challenging.
5. **Static vs Dynamic Typing**: COBOL uses static typing, where data types are defined during the compilation phase, while Java and Python utilize dynamic typing, where types are determined during runtime, providing more flexibility.
6. **Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)**: Java and Python fully support OOP concepts such as classes, objects, inheritance, and polymorphism, while COBOL has limited support for OOP features.

In Summary, the key differences between COBOL and Java and Python lie in their syntax, usage, platform support, community, typing systems, and OOP capabilities. 

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Advice on Python, Java, COBOL

Thomas
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
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
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
Python
Java
Java
COBOL
COBOL

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!

COBOL was one of the first programming languages to be standardised: the first COBOL standard was issued by ANSI in 1968. COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
69.7K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
33.3K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
262.8K
Stacks
148.0K
Stacks
130
Followers
205.4K
Followers
105.5K
Followers
147
Votes
6.9K
Votes
3.7K
Votes
2
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
  • 2
    Business Oriented Language
Cons
  • 2
    Extremely long code for simple functions
Integrations
Django
Django
Spring
Spring
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Python, Java, COBOL?

JavaScript

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

PHP

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

Ruby

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

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

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#

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

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.

Elixir

Elixir

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.

Swift

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

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.

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