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> everyone else will keep quickly shipping things with it while you worry about five processes waking up from a system call at once or an extra 150mb of memory

> everyone else will keep quickly shipping things with it while you worry about five processes waking up from a system call at once or an extra 150mb of memory usage With the current state of ecosystems, this quality-vs-quantity mutual exclusivity is much less pronounced. These days, you can fire up these services as quick or quicker than in Python with better performance and resource usage that is also more maintainable. Unless you speak of highly ecosystem-dependant libraries (e.g. ML), Python defenses that rely on time to market say more about the author's narrow comfort than general expediency.

orf 7y ago
Citation needed. You can write anything you want in any language you want, but if your team is experienced with Python then they will continue to ship value quickly. Sure, maybe if they were all well versed in brainfuck they could ship things quicker. Narrowing in on the rather specific point about shipping things with Python and ignoring the larger argument that it doesn't freaking matter if things are not as efficient as they could possibly be is quite odd to be honest. I'm sure some of the arguments in the blog post would apply to whatever language you had in mind while writing your reply.
nimish 7y ago
Of course weird domain specific libraries are a major reason to use python. I can get my oddball service up in a few days vs weeks or months to replicate some bizarre library. If all you're doing is basic web stuff then sure you can do it in Lang du jour but even after a decade go doesn't have a competent xml library for example. Time to market is killer. Python buys you time to determine whether your product is even worth building. Deployment sucks though. e: I literally could not have written the services in my current role in a language other than Java or Python without replicating 100kloc libraries. Java would have required a bunch of work to integrate with the other services we had. So: python. If that costs me an extra $1k/mo for servers but gets us a customer paying $100k a month, was it wasteful?
- lmm 7y ago
  Why was it easier to integrate with those other services from Python than from Java? Only because you already picked Python for those, right? (I agree with you about time to market being the important thing. I don't think Python is winning that game any more though: its dependency management and deployment has fallen behind the rest of the industry, and newer languages have largely caught up with its conciseness without having to make the same compromises)
  - nimish 7y ago
    Not really. Setting up a scalable Java service is complicated even with tooling like spring boot, and Java has better libraries for our use case, but the feedback cycle and general code velocity was much slower since we'd be on java 8 among other things. Plus learning spring or a Java ee framework is tantamount to learning a whole new language it wasn't worth the time then.
    - lmm 7y ago
      > Setting up a scalable Java service is complicated even with tooling like spring boot How so? You can use much the same techniques you would in Python, or you can deploy a .war to a bunch of application servers and achieve what you'd do with docker/kubernetes/etc. in a much simpler way. You've also got a much better chance of scaling up with a single instance and not needing to scale horizontally. > the feedback cycle and general code velocity was much slower since we'd be on java 8 among other things What's keeping you on Java 8? Major JVM version upgrades are much easier and safer than even minor Python upgrades. I'm not doubting your situation, but old version of one language versus new version of another is not really a fair basis for comparison. > Plus learning spring or a Java ee framework is tantamount to learning a whole new language it wasn't worth the time then. Sure. I'm not saying it's wrong to choose to stick with the technology you're currently using - there's definitely a cost to switching or learning something new. But it's worth being conscious of whether your technology choices are being driven by legacy constraints and whether you'd want to make a different choice on a green-field project.

orf 7y ago

Citation needed. You can write anything you want in any language you want, but if your team is experienced with Python then they will continue to ship value quickly. Sure, maybe if they were all well versed in brainfuck they could ship things quicker. Narrowing in on the rather specific point about shipping things with Python and ignoring the larger argument that it doesn't freaking matter if things are not as efficient as they could possibly be is quite odd to be honest. I'm sure some of the arguments in the blog post would apply to whatever language you had in mind while writing your reply.

nimish 7y ago

Of course weird domain specific libraries are a major reason to use python. I can get my oddball service up in a few days vs weeks or months to replicate some bizarre library. If all you're doing is basic web stuff then sure you can do it in Lang du jour but even after a decade go doesn't have a competent xml library for example. Time to market is killer. Python buys you time to determine whether your product is even worth building. Deployment sucks though. e: I literally could not have written the services in my current role in a language other than Java or Python without replicating 100kloc libraries. Java would have required a bunch of work to integrate with the other services we had. So: python. If that costs me an extra $1k/mo for servers but gets us a customer paying $100k a month, was it wasteful?

lmm 7y ago
Why was it easier to integrate with those other services from Python than from Java? Only because you already picked Python for those, right? (I agree with you about time to market being the important thing. I don't think Python is winning that game any more though: its dependency management and deployment has fallen behind the rest of the industry, and newer languages have largely caught up with its conciseness without having to make the same compromises)
- nimish 7y ago
  Not really. Setting up a scalable Java service is complicated even with tooling like spring boot, and Java has better libraries for our use case, but the feedback cycle and general code velocity was much slower since we'd be on java 8 among other things. Plus learning spring or a Java ee framework is tantamount to learning a whole new language it wasn't worth the time then.
  - lmm 7y ago
    > Setting up a scalable Java service is complicated even with tooling like spring boot How so? You can use much the same techniques you would in Python, or you can deploy a .war to a bunch of application servers and achieve what you'd do with docker/kubernetes/etc. in a much simpler way. You've also got a much better chance of scaling up with a single instance and not needing to scale horizontally. > the feedback cycle and general code velocity was much slower since we'd be on java 8 among other things What's keeping you on Java 8? Major JVM version upgrades are much easier and safer than even minor Python upgrades. I'm not doubting your situation, but old version of one language versus new version of another is not really a fair basis for comparison. > Plus learning spring or a Java ee framework is tantamount to learning a whole new language it wasn't worth the time then. Sure. I'm not saying it's wrong to choose to stick with the technology you're currently using - there's definitely a cost to switching or learning something new. But it's worth being conscious of whether your technology choices are being driven by legacy constraints and whether you'd want to make a different choice on a green-field project.