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Comment by danielovichdk | Hacker News Reader

When did anyone start to believe that languages scale ?

I like the cute expression that you're referencing, but for a majority of projects, to a major extent, language choice greatly matters. If you're getting 10x performance from Go over RoR, that's 10 fewer servers you need to deal with and a lot less thinking about network concurrency.

Meanwhile, most web applications are content with 1/10th of the computing resources that are deployed for them, regardless of language or framework.

That's totally fair, but the underlying suggestion that "language choice isn't really important to scaling" is more what I was addressing.

what do you mean?

I think he meant, in a slightly acid (but valid) way, that languages don't scale, but concepts and good programming techniques do.

You can scale up whatever code you want in whatever language, you just need to structure it in a way that allows for that.

It might be a variant of the old argument that "languages aren't slow, implementations are", meaning that scalability is a property of the language, not the implementation.

In any case, this is written in C so I'm not sure it proves anything about the Python language.

It says something about the performance that is available from the Python language. This is how Python has always been, starting from the interpret and builtin data structures in CPython which are written in C. That isn't cheating, that's normal, realistic usage of the tool. Why should benchmarks go out of their way to use only unrealistic Python programs just to prove that it cannot "x += 1" as fast as C? Who is surprised by that, and why would it matter? Node uses libuv and nobody blinks an eye.

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