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I love Python, but it's a rubbish article I regret to have upvoted.

> Python is robust

This paragraph does not feature a word about robustness. There are mentions of speed and scalability and some sort of benchmark showing a case where Python is faster than Ruby or PHP. Conclusion: "It's also very fast".

The rest is less terrible but does not mention any of Python's shortcomings.

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Are there any widely-used languages that aren't robust? That seems like kind of shallow praise.

Depends what you call robust. If you mean "strongly typed", PHP and Javascript come to mind immediately.

By robust, I mean the language/compiler has a strong test suite and the runtime is known to work reliably in production settings. I've heard horror stories about Sun's HotSpot JIT crashing frequently, but that was what, 10 or 20 years ago? Now that I think about it, Scala might be a modern example of that, but I haven't kept up with how they might have improved.

In this case, yes, real-world languages have a solid runtime/compiler. Though I'm surprised you have issues with Scala, at least the runtime part should be rock solid, given that it runs on a very much battle-tested JVM.

PHP has a test suite, but it's released with over hundred tests failing. See here: http://gcov.php.net/viewer.php?version=PHP_5_5

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