I think the key here is to see using the Python language as an engineering discipline like any other, and just take the classes, read the literature, learn from

I think the key here is to see using the Python language as an engineering discipline like any other, and just take the classes, read the literature, learn from more Senior Engineers, and projects, before attempting to develop these types of systems on your own. I don't think anybody expects a recent graduate from computing science, with maybe 4 or 5 classes that used python under their belt (and maybe a co-op or two) to be writing robust code (perhaps in any language). But, after working with Sr. Engineers who do so, and understanding how to catch your exceptions and respond appropriately, how to fail (and restart) various modules in the face of unexpected issues (memory, disk failures, etc...) - then a python system is just as robust as any other language. I speak from the experience of running them in factories all over the planet and never once (outside of power outages - and even there it was just downtime, not data loss) in 2+ years seeing a single system go down or in any way lose or distort data. And if you want more performance? Make good use of numpy/pandas and throw more cores/processes at the problem. Just being aware of every exception you can throw (and catching it) and making robust use of type hinting takes you a long way. Also - and this may be more appropriate to Python than other languages that are a bit more stable, an insane amount of unit and regression testing helps defend quite a bit from underlying libraries like pandas changing the rules from under you. The test code on these project always seemed to outweigh the actual code by 3-5x. "Every line of code is a liability, Every test is a golden asset." was kind of the mantra. I think that what makes python different from other languages, is that it doesn't enforce guardrails/type checking/etc... As a result, it makes it trivial for anyone who isn't an engineers to start blasting out code that does useful stuff. But, because those guardrails aren't enforced in the language, it's the responsibility of the engineer to add them in to ensure robustness of the developed system. That's the tradeoff.