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Was there ever a point people were successfully building "backbone" systems in dynamically typed languages? I thought the pythons and Perl's of the world were a
by Tanjreeve 5y ago
Was there ever a point people were successfully building "backbone" systems in dynamically typed languages? I thought the pythons and Perl's of the world were always mainly doing scripts/interface applications.
- stevesimmons 5y agoSee [1] for a PyData London talk I did on "Python at Massive Scale", about JPMorgan's Athena trading and risk management system, used for FX, Commodities, Credit, Equities, etc trading. At that time, Athena had 4,500 Python developers doing 20,000 commits a week. Also see one recent HN discussion on "An Oral History of Bank Python" [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYD9yyMh9Hk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYD9yyMh9Hk [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29104047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29104047
- Tanjreeve 5y agoThank you this is super interesting having only heard vague hand waving about bank python. I'm still a bit dubious on it if you don't have the manpower budget to keep this kind of custom setup running but it's really interesting to know how it's done by people who do.
- zmmmmm 5y agoDunno if you ever heard of this thing called Facebook ... but for a long time it was implemented almost entirely in PHP. The truth is, the argument that you cannot implement complex systems in dynamic languages has always been empirically fraught because there are so many counter examples. The problem is, even if static languages are "better" for such things, dynamic languages are certainly not bad enough at it to prevent them being successfully used for large scale systems.