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Comment by shanebellone | Hacker News Reader

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shanebellone

All the top tech companies use Python for product.

Google

Facebook + Instagram (largest deployment of Django)

Spotify (millions of lines of Python)

Netflix

Dropbox (millions of lines of Python)

YouTube

Plenty more examples.

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Google / YouTube no longer use Python “for product”, at least, not in the serving path. Dropbox has also been moving away and towards Golang.

Instagram (Cinder), Google (Unladen Swallow) and Dropbox (Pyston) have also all experimented with heavy engineering investment trying to improve Python performance and only one of them (Cinder) has outcompeted the “just rewrite it in a faster language” strategy.

Also...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/python-311-faster-cpyt...

I think it's a great pattern to start with Python and do something once performance becomes a problem. You can afford it when you're successful thanks to the code you wrote in Python, or it won't be a problem anyway.

Reddit is also transitioning away to Go, and Netflix is not a Python shop, they're far more Java with some Node.

Netflix uses Python for their recommendation engine, correct?

> How popular would Python be without the scientific users and the machine learning ecosystem?

All those use dozens (hundreds?) of other tech for product too.

How is this an answer to the question?

"How popular would Python be without the scientific users and the machine learning ecosystem?"

... do I really need to explain this?

Yes.

P used for something in places in parallel of hundreds of (several exotic, rarely used) technologies is not really predicting how much P was used without scientific and ML uses. What if P is mostly used for scientific and ML purposes in those places, or as an experiment, study, not necessarily being a backbone? Or with other secondary agenda, overstated, etc. The mere fact that P is used in a huge amalgam of A,B,C,... tells very little alone concerning the question. Almost nothing.

Yes, needs some unwrapping what you believe.

It's not solely used for scientific and machine learning at any of the aforementioned companies. It is the (or was) chosen by a number of technology companies who have the resources and knowledge to select the correct languages to address one or more of their existing problems. That is evidence of use and use case.

I would argue moving away from Python at global scale doesn't even negate my point. All products change with scale.

Agreed. And sur, shouldn't move away. The whole matter is a hypothetical thing anyway.

It's also the primary language used for everything regarding VFX. Think Pixar, ILM, WETA, Disney etc. it's mostly inhouse tools so nobody ever sees them but the code bases are huge and are growing as fast as the demand for more and more high quality VFX from streaming services and studios.

That's interesting. I wasn't aware of this. Thanks for the share.

Now that you say VFX, Python is indeed heavily used in this industry. It's used in internal tooling but many of the open-sourced projects under the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) umbrella also have a Python interface. Python is also popular among color scientists, of which many work in VFX it seems. By the way, the industry also makes heavy use of Qt, also in combination with Python, to quickly build production tools with a GUI.

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