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I can't take any of these server Python projects seriously. It's like mocking up a car in styrofoam and then just...releasing that mockup as the actual product.

franga2000 6y ago
Ah yes, all those styrofoam cars such as Instagram, Reddit, Bitbucket, Eventbrite.....
- bschwindHN 6y ago
  Notice how the load balancers, databases, and caching layers at those places are _not_ written in Python. They then have to run a wasteful amount of instances to keep their Python services afloat. Modern computers can do an amazing amount of work in a given time slice, but it's a shame when so much of that is thrown away because someone decided to implement it in Python.
  - franga2000 6y ago
    Yes, because those layers aren't theirs. They are products of other companies that specialise in high-performance and stable software. They can afford to use annoying languages because performance is one of the main things they compete on. But for something like a social network, performance isn't something they care about. They care about being able to develop and roll out new features as fast as possible. The overhead of working in a language makes things hard and/or has poor tooling is far greater than the increased server cost of working in something like Python (or, as much as I hate to admit it, Node). (note, that I'm not talking about the client side here. developers should serve their users and a slow fronted is bad for users. a slow backend, however, is not something users care about) And since we're specifically talking about an open source project here, look at the difference in community contributions between any two equally popular projects where one is written in something ridiculous like C++ and the other in JavaScript. Even Go and Rust, which are as close to modern as it gets in the world of compiled languages, are still decades behind Java, Python and Node in features, tooling and support. So until those catch up, anything that doesn't need performance above all else is probably going to stick to more friendly languages and not lose sleep about wasted CPU cycles - after all, we built computers specifically to simplify our work and that's exactly what these languages are doing.

franga2000 6y ago

Ah yes, all those styrofoam cars such as Instagram, Reddit, Bitbucket, Eventbrite.....

bschwindHN 6y ago
Notice how the load balancers, databases, and caching layers at those places are _not_ written in Python. They then have to run a wasteful amount of instances to keep their Python services afloat. Modern computers can do an amazing amount of work in a given time slice, but it's a shame when so much of that is thrown away because someone decided to implement it in Python.
- franga2000 6y ago
  Yes, because those layers aren't theirs. They are products of other companies that specialise in high-performance and stable software. They can afford to use annoying languages because performance is one of the main things they compete on. But for something like a social network, performance isn't something they care about. They care about being able to develop and roll out new features as fast as possible. The overhead of working in a language makes things hard and/or has poor tooling is far greater than the increased server cost of working in something like Python (or, as much as I hate to admit it, Node). (note, that I'm not talking about the client side here. developers should serve their users and a slow fronted is bad for users. a slow backend, however, is not something users care about) And since we're specifically talking about an open source project here, look at the difference in community contributions between any two equally popular projects where one is written in something ridiculous like C++ and the other in JavaScript. Even Go and Rust, which are as close to modern as it gets in the world of compiled languages, are still decades behind Java, Python and Node in features, tooling and support. So until those catch up, anything that doesn't need performance above all else is probably going to stick to more friendly languages and not lose sleep about wasted CPU cycles - after all, we built computers specifically to simplify our work and that's exactly what these languages are doing.