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Comment by ChrisLomont | Hacker News Reader

>the most successful products in the world did it anyway

A few successful projects in the world did it. There's likely far more successful products that didn't use it.

The key metric along this line is how often each language allows success to some level and how often they fail (especially when due to the choice of language).

>should be lauded rather than scrutinized

One can do both at the same time.

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Instagram has one billion monthly users generating $7 billion a year. There are almost zero products on earth as successful.

The point is that it's still one project. You need to count the failures as well to rule out survivorship bias.

Just compare Instagram written in Python to Google Wave, Google+ or any other Google's social media, written in C++/Java :))))

And you can put 7 billion of effort into tweaking your python application performance?

> Instagram has one billion monthly users generating $7 billion a year.

Doesn't Instagram serve mostly static content that's put together in an appealing way by mobile apps? I'd figure Instagram's CDN has far more impact than whatever Python code it's running somewhere in it's entrails.

Cargo cult approaches to tech stacks don't define quality.

> The key metric along this line is how often each language allows success to some level and how often they fail

How does python score on these key metrics?

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