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Comment by jsjenkins168 | Hacker News Reader

This is a huge announcement, although I am surprised that it is not designed to support anything other than Python. This hindrance might keep more people using AWS than they might realize.

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"... although I am surprised that it is not designed to support anything other than Python ..."

Why? The Google "big 3 language" choices are Cpp, Java & python ~ http://panela.blog-city.com/python_at_google_greg_stein__sdf... You may see perl or other languages but the "big 3" are the officially supported ones.

"... python ... but it will be a non-starter for many developers. ..."

I find that an interesting statement. Why say that? Python is a pretty easy language to learn & use.

Its a great language and easy to learn and use, but it might greatly limit their business relative to AWS.

I polled HN about a month ago to see what percentages of HN readers used what languages for web development, and while Python was the most common, its still only used by 22% of those polled. Take this data with a grain of salt, but still an interesting statistic:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxT7jIffmj3lGdXFcn9hK...

It's not even the choice of python that's a limiting factor, its that you don't have a full server, just a language sandbox. Still it might be a great place to start a web application.

I wonder if this -- coupled with Django going 1.0 soon -- will create even more buzz for Django?

"... I wonder if this -- coupled with Django going 1.0 soon -- will create even more buzz for Django? ..."

Prophetic suggestion ~ http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/django.html & http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=157648

i agree, what could possibly be the technical reason for only supporting python?

one thing I know is that Google loves python, so its a natural choice to start with. No doubt they'll be adding support for other languages as time allows.

I would assume that google built a sandbox (probably like appjet), for python. It's not trivial to build a sandbox for a language, and it's certainly not trivial to build multiple all at once - which is why they are only launching with one (python).

Read the first post. They had to harden Python to allow third party code to run on their network. Other languages (once hardened) are coming...

This may be the move for Python to overtake Ruby in web app industry..This seems even more revolutionary than what RoR did before 3 years ago..

pyRuby anyone :p ??

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