Interestingly the first version of Google Search's frontend was written in Python, based off the Medusa framework. It was replaced by a heavily-optimized C web

Interestingly the first version of Google Search's frontend was written in Python, based off the Medusa framework. It was replaced by a heavily-optimized C webserver (GWS) written by Craig Silverstein in 1999. The Python -> C rewrite took the frontend server fleet from 30 machines down to 3, and it would've fit on 1 but they needed fault tolerance. There continued (and continues) to be a large prejudice against Python for large-scale software projects at Google, even among people who were core members of the Python Software Foundation! I think this is a good example of peoples' mental models of the world ossifying and not understanding how economics have changed. Python continues to be 30x or more slower than C - but it doesn't matter. Computing has gotten so cheap that you just eat the cost, build your product anyways, and then figure out how to optimize after you sell to Google.