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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Google App Engine was almost a science project for the first few years, only supporting languages that Google used internally.

Python?

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I'm pretty sure that the original scraping scripts that Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked on (before Google was called Google) were written in Python. (Although I can't find the reference I read about that, so could be mistaken.)

[UPDATE] According to Wikipedia (judge for yourself), Larry Page is quoted as saying:

    "BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs
    on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux."

, back in 1996 whilst he was still at Stanford (Backrub being the original project name).

Google uses a lot of Python, I thought. They started unladen-swallow.

My point is that Python is not some crazy language only used by Google. It's Python.

Python, Java

My understanding is Google uses: Python, Java, C++ and Go and language choice is at the discretion of team involved.

Guido van Rossum (Python Inventor) worked at Google--That's why they went Python.

They went Python long before Guido started working there.

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