3 ms·

Incredibly reasonable. People love to trash on the performance of Python and JS saying that they're totally unsuitable for backend services with non-trivial amo

Incredibly reasonable. People love to trash on the performance of Python and JS saying that they're totally unsuitable for backend services with non-trivial amounts of traffic when they're usually the most cost effective solution for a business. These higher level languages are easier to hire for, much easier to prototype, allow for faster iteration, allow for substantially faster on-ramp time, and are fast enough to run these io bound workloads.

hedora 3y ago
I have had the opposite experience with every python team I have interacted with. On top of it being slow and brittle, dependencies break, needlessly destabilizing stuff. Worse, the python team ends up having the hardest job, due to self-inflicted problems, so it either ends up with junior devs that don’t know better, or bitter senior devs that could be 10x more productive doing something else. As always, it varies from company to company, but this is what I saw on four teams out of four at multiple companies.
- pphysch 3y ago
  > dependencies break You can abuse dependencies in every language. This doesn't sound like a Python problem but a bad tech management problem (i.e. who signed off on allowing 'randomguy69/left-pad' as a dependency).
  - varjag 3y ago
    With Python it doesn't take abuse. You blink and the bloody thing rots away.
    - pphysch 3y ago
      Relative to what other language?
      - varjag 3y ago
        Any other than JS/node really. But since this thread mentions Common Lisp, its package management system rarely blows up in your face.
      - lanstin 3y ago
        go lang done a few services and CLIs and never had updating deps break anything unless you count newer linters complain about new things.
dilap 3y ago
we have account servers for a game in java that end up being cpu bound (we have to scale up based on cpu, not network), which is much much faster than python. so i would be surprised if a server written in python could saturate the network, for a reddit-style workload, which i imagine would be similar. any1 have relecent experiences to share?

hedora 3y ago

I have had the opposite experience with every python team I have interacted with. On top of it being slow and brittle, dependencies break, needlessly destabilizing stuff. Worse, the python team ends up having the hardest job, due to self-inflicted problems, so it either ends up with junior devs that don’t know better, or bitter senior devs that could be 10x more productive doing something else. As always, it varies from company to company, but this is what I saw on four teams out of four at multiple companies.

pphysch 3y ago
> dependencies break You can abuse dependencies in every language. This doesn't sound like a Python problem but a bad tech management problem (i.e. who signed off on allowing 'randomguy69/left-pad' as a dependency).
- varjag 3y ago
  With Python it doesn't take abuse. You blink and the bloody thing rots away.
  - pphysch 3y ago
    Relative to what other language?
    - varjag 3y ago
      Any other than JS/node really. But since this thread mentions Common Lisp, its package management system rarely blows up in your face.
    - lanstin 3y ago
      go lang done a few services and CLIs and never had updating deps break anything unless you count newer linters complain about new things.

dilap 3y ago

we have account servers for a game in java that end up being cpu bound (we have to scale up based on cpu, not network), which is much much faster than python. so i would be surprised if a server written in python could saturate the network, for a reddit-style workload, which i imagine would be similar. any1 have relecent experiences to share?