marcharper

Even more towards the point of the essay, users of Facebook are not looking for products and services. Facebook lets people keep tabs on each other and maintain more acquaintances but almost no one goes to Facebook to locate goods or services.

The problems is not only that Facebook lacks the ability to pinpoint precisely what its users want in the manner that Google can, it's that Facebook is the wrong environment to sell specific things to people. Again: people use social sites to keep tabs on people, not to buy stuff or look for specific items or services. The only ads worth showing on Facebook are those that emphasize brand loyalty, and frankly, the money is better spent on television ads.

The reason for the low variance in python solution times is a design feature: "there should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it" (Guido).

Of course there is often more than one way to do anything in python. For instance, Guido prefers list comprehensions to using map even though both drop down to the C-layer for improved performance whereas iterating/looping generally does not. Most python programmers, however, seem to stay away from the functional programming aspects of python, if their code is any indication.

Although python has the basics of functional programming: map, reduce, lazy evaluation (for some iterators/generators), its support for lambda functions is clumsy and many advanced features (such as monads) are not present in the standard libraries at all. Python lets you experiment with functional programming but that's about it.