Microsoft Ships Python Code in 1996 (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Ships Python Code in 1996 (2009)

python-history.blogspot.com

72 pointsadamnemecek21 comments

To this day it doesn't seize to amaze me how many companies run on python - JPMorgan, Bank of America, LinkedIn, Dropbox, etc etc etc - that's probably at least 15K devs right there. And so many more ... Makes me proud to be a python dev :)

Facebook has a very extensive Python codebase as well. 21% of all backend code is Python:

https://code.facebook.com/posts/1040181199381023/python-in-p...

I would like to know how much out of 21% are for scripting/shell/utility, how much for services, how much are truly part of the real products.

Calling scripting/shell/utility for "backend" might give wrong ideas to certain crowds who might have thought that backend is more important than front end product sensitive code that 1Billion users interact with everyday.

LinkedIN is a Java/Scala shop.

Other than Dropbox (well, technically they seem to move toward Go/Rust? for core critical infrastructure), I rarely see medium to big scal projects using largely Python. Instagram, while uses Python, is relatively small size shop/group of people. I don't know well how big pinterest/eventbrite.

Some BigCos are using Python for less important projects (scratching their itch maybe?)

I don't mean to disrespect the language or the community, I prefer it over other languages but after reading all Python success story, I concluded that more of them are just for morale booster for the community. 10 years large scale Python project is probably very rare...(maybe YouTube but the again the major use of Youtube is their video/streaming, non-Python)

Maybe you look at the false examples :)

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/corporate-strategy-office... = Cisco Web & Email Security

The Source for the Server is now open source: https://github.com/ironport/shrapnel (python / cython /Pyrex)

And disqus had run mainly on Python before they moved some parts to Go-Lang

https://github.com/disqus

Many Gov's / Edu's run on Plone

Plone, while written in Python, should be considered as a packaged app. These small units of govt and edu mostly just install it with a few modifications/installed plugins.

No offense to disqus but they are relatively small.

So I believe my statement still holds true.

To me, saying YouTube is non-Python is like saying Facebook is non-PHP.

Facebook has long stop using PHP in its pure form and also adopted many other languages.

They are now using HHVM, Hack, Reason, Erlang, C++, JavaScript, OCaml, Haskell.

YouTube has moved some of their core components to Go.

> Some BigCos are using Python for less important projects (scratching their itch maybe?)

You are very very wrong, but I'm not violating any NDAs here

Very wrong sounds absolutes while my statement clearly generalizing the situation, which means there will be rare exceptions. But those are just rare exceptions.

What do you mean by "run on python"? Those companies use pretty much every language in existence (not quite, but you get the point, I hope).

The Dropbox client for one is coded in Python, and Dropbox even started their own "improved Python interpreter" project.

Or take Google for example, where Python was (still is for all I know) one of the few officially sanctioned languages: Python, C++, Java (and now Go too -- which, contrary to popular belief hasn't been some kind of exclusive language Google uses, nor has it toppled C++/Java/Python etc from their codebases).

Dropbox has few million lines of Python code. Chase and Bank of America have few thousand contributors on Athena and Quartz projects.

Another big elephant is OpenStack.

It was replace by Microsoft Commerce Server which was sold to another company, there is the rest of the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitecore_Commerce_Server

Don't large corporations switch to a statically typed languages when their code base grows? (FB tried Hack, Google still uses Java(Ads)/C++, Netflix using Java) Personally I felt the same when dealing with large code base. Does this apply to anyone else too out here? I'm really curious to know how much of the main revenue generating and critical code are in a statically typed language.

That being said, I love python and its the goto language when it comes to shell scripting replacement/quick internal web applications/dev ops stuff etc.

Yeah they do. Python is a godsend for small quick iterative development, but it doesn't scale well to a team of hundreds of people with a bajillion lines of code. Testing in Python is very nice (in part due to its dynamic nature, the thing that can cause bugs in larger systems) so if you have proper coverage and a good test suite (which everyone does... Right? :P) its not too bad.

Type hints are also definitely going to help this.

These days people have learned to compensate the lack of type checking with an increased amount of tests.

If you need static typing to deal with code base grows, Python has type hints now.

FWIW, Xerox shipped an all-Python product in 1997 called DocuShare. It is still being sold but was re-written in Java a few years later because they felt their customers wanted it to be more enterprisey. Today the use of Python would not be controversial at all so we have come a long way.

Reminds me I found some scheme code in Alias Maya in early 2Ks.

Duplicate of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12139625 (posted 6 hours earlier)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com