I myself have coded a streaming platform getting half a million user every day in Python. Baring the CDN to store the content, it runs on 2 servers, one for the DB.
So real things get done in Python pretty well.
_But as the company grew, new engineers who joined couldn’t understand the code. Clever code is usually short and cryptic, written by and for the individual who came up with it, but is hard for anyone else to understand—and nearly impossible to maintain. Guido called this “cowboy coding culture”. He recognized its value in our early stages of trying to implement things quickly, but knew it wouldn’t be sustainable over time, so he decided to speak up in his own quiet way._
And now they'll have to rewrite everything in programming languages where maintenance is not a burden.
[0] https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/thank-you--guido
Here you go:
https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...