That's not how I read the article. It sounded like Page's original version didn't work so he hired an RA to fix it. The RA spent more time debugging the (then v

That's not how I read the article. It sounded like Page's original version didn't work so he hired an RA to fix it. The RA spent more time debugging the (then very immature) Java than he did debugging Page's code so he rewrote it in Python. Once they started getting traffic, the Python script that the RA had written couldn't stand up anymore, so they hired engineers to fix it again, who did so by rewriting it in C++. Page's choice of Java originally was probably a faddish choice, given that Java was being hyped into the stratosphere by Sun at the time, even though neither the language nor its implementation were ready for prime time. The RA's choice of python was more reasonable, but Python was a highly esoteric research language at the point and did not have the ecosystem around it yet for writing scalable production code.