But I contributed a tiny bit of code to reddit back when it was open source and chatted with reddit engineers on IRC, so I do know the official justification (as of 2010ish) for reddit sticking with python:
Websites are mostly IO bound anyway. The hot parts like markdown formatting and templating are already c modules. So the performances gain for rewriting in a compiled language aren't large enough to justify it.
On top of it being slow and brittle, dependencies break, needlessly destabilizing stuff.
Worse, the python team ends up having the hardest job, due to self-inflicted problems, so it either ends up with junior devs that don’t know better, or bitter senior devs that could be 10x more productive doing something else.
As always, it varies from company to company, but this is what I saw on four teams out of four at multiple companies.
You can abuse dependencies in every language. This doesn't sound like a Python problem but a bad tech management problem (i.e. who signed off on allowing 'randomguy69/left-pad' as a dependency).
done a few services and CLIs and never had updating deps break anything unless you count newer linters complain about new things.
so i would be surprised if a server written in python could saturate the network, for a reddit-style workload, which i imagine would be similar.
any1 have relecent experiences to share?
With the "new" reddit they replaced most of the frontend with javascript and it really shows. That's not to say I like sites that use too much javascript but python is slow enough just parsing and filling html templates, seemingly.