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Comment by rodmena | Hacker News Reader

Python is not only a scripting language. It powers many many websites including Youtube. It's a full power limitless language. Your statement is simply wrong.

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> Python is not only a scripting language.

The Python (programming language) is. Ok, if you want to get pedantic you can talk about the language vs interpreter vs ecosystem? I'm not sure what you are getting at.

> It powers many many websites including Youtube. It's a full power limitless language.

Lots of things "power" Youtube. I'm not sure how that's important to point out.

> It's a full power limitless language

Unless you want to do something crazy like run 2 threads at the same time

Python is not limitless. It has very much reached its limit and has major problems with performance, concurrency/parallelism, static analysis and formal semantics. This is why many refer to it as a "scripting language". This doesn't necessary stop people building billion dollar businesses with it though, look at PHP.

> It powers many many websites including Youtube.

And this was such a scalability problem that Youtube decided to spend the unimaginable amount of pain and suffering to rewrite in C++.

I partially agree with your statement. Writing anything in C++ would cause _unimaginable_ amount of pain and suffering. Better way is to isolate slow CPU heavy stuff and write it in C without suffering.

That's certainly an opinion that C fundamentally makes things easier to write than C++, but not one held by Google in general.

A major problem with scalability at Google is that the CPU heavy stuff has often already been isolated and what is actually needed is a sort of ambient performance rather than just focusing on hot loops.

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