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Comment by techdragon | Hacker News Reader

The reality borne out by the evidence [0][1] is that Python is at the very least perfectly suitable for the development of web stacks powering companies worth in excess of hundreds of million dollars.

Putting aside concrete technical issues regarding the python runtime’s performance envelope (eg: startup time, FFI inter-op call time, etc) and memory footprint, there is no reason not to use Python. Again, concrete technical issues aside, Python will not be an issue until your business is big enough that having to push the performance of your product is a nice problem to have and you will probably have the money to spend solving it by either optimising your python or rewriting parts of your application, as all these large companies have done.

0 - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/top-10-sites-built-django-fra... 1 - https://worldwebtech.weebly.com/blog/top-ten-most-popular-we...

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You can substitute Python for assembly, point at the Apollo mission and your argument still holds.

Rarely is a programming language chosen because it actually is the best tool for the job. Often, it’s whatever the people at the ground floor were most comfortable getting a prototype out the door with. Prototype working well? Fix this bug, add yonder feature. Before you know it you’ve built Facebook in PHP. “PHP is at the very least suitable for the development etc etc”, yes, that’s why Facebook invested all that effort in Hiphop VM.

There’s an irony in saying “there’s no reason not to use X” in reply to an article that is about a company spending a ton of effort working around a problem in X.

My point is: as a community, it’s our duty to learn from these mistakes. Let’s admit there is a problem, investigate, adapt, overcome. We can improve whatever will be the next Python so the next Instagram doesn’t have to go through this. But that won’t work if we keep saying “this is a nice problem to have, there’s nothing wrong.” It isn’t. There is. Look at the article.

I'm not claiming that one can't be successful by using Python (or pretty much any programming language). Market success or user count are unfortunately not tightly correlated with technical excellence, as many of us have bitterly found out.

Development speed, maintainability, error count are also important development issues. Unfortunately we don't have much data to judge, but the little that we have such as this article indicate that dynamic typing has a non-negligible negative impact on the above.

""having to push the performance of your product is a nice problem to have and you will probably have the money to spend solving it by either optimising your python or rewriting parts of your application, as all these large companies have done.""

Not considering the topic at all is negligent. I don't understand why you're so sure that the only possible outcomes are either not reaching scale or having the money to optimise or rewrite.

First of all, not even Facebook had the money to rewrite their PHP code base, so that's probably out of the question. And it's very well possible that one will reach scale and not have the money (or worse the time) to optimise, if optimising means inventing type checkers.

At least one should spend some time thinking about this topic and picking a language that is flexible and can scale at least somewhat. Having to stop writing production code in order to invent a Ruby static type checker or native compiler is decidedly not a good problem to have.

> ...we don't have much data to judge, but the little that we have such as this article indicate that dynamic typing has a non-negligible negative impact on the above.

In my own experience I see it on a spectrum: there are design decisions you can avoid by using dynamic typing that give you speed in the small that start to show their absence in the large. Savings on inputs (quicker coding), tend to evaporate as complexity grows because you're using so much time analysing outputs (the system), to determine behaviour. Every bit of up-front work saved gets amortised across issue after issue, and runtime testing during development, and increasing stagnation in high-level architecture.

For me the ideal is the type system of Haskell with the linguistic power of Haskell and the type inference of Haskell... only on a mainstream platform I can convince management to use.

> Market success or user count are unfortunately not tightly correlated with technical excellence, as many of us have bitterly found out

It depends on how you define technical excellence. I would suggest a low memory usage might get you a thumbs up from HN, but isn't real technical excellence the ability to solve users problems?

Nope. Publishing an offer on Craigslist to help with homework via Skype is solving some users' problems, yet has nothing to do with "technical excellence".

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