Comment by moreless | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moreless | Hacker News Reader

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> This tool is the proof that Python has significant problems at scale, which is something the Python community has denied for a long time. They're still doing it in this thread, but the lesson looks pretty clear to me: if you plan on building large scale, don't use Python. Or PHP while we're at it (see Facebook).

Yeah, absolutely, don't do this! These are two examples of successful companies that did it and look at them now! </s>

Being able to move fast and produce a winning product on time is much more important for startups. What does it matter if you used <your_cool_scalable_thingie> for a project, when it never went past 10 users because you were concentrating on wrong side aspect of your business? PHP is fine. Python is great. Use the tools that fit your problem and you know how to use, not the latest toy.

There are two things that are critically incorrect about your argument:

1) That market success implies having quality software. Average seems to be enough in my experience.

2) That start-ups are a good example to follow if one wants to achieve good quality. In fact they should be ignored, because they will absolutely murder quality in order to stay alive. Sometimes the product doesn't even work and is held together with duct tape in order to get past that important demo... It's quite pointless to discuss quality and start-ups.

The lesson I mentioned should be heeded by mature companies that are able to do some project planning, complexity estimation, etc.

How do you identify the inflection point and then execute when it hits? There are conservative choices that would scale all the way through, but many startups would avoid them due to the hit on "velocity" (which is itself a very fuzzy topic.)

It seems that this same pattern plays out with many tools, and not just languages. When you've built something and you now have a team, processes, etc. built up it becomes difficult to see the forest for the trees, or to make the hard decisions because it might involve replacing people.

HN has a favorite pastime: dismissing tech that has demonstrated incredible utility because it’s lacks some kind of ideological purity they demand.

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