[mahyarm]

The threading story isn't great. It's not statically typed, which can make working on a large codebase with more people more painful. It also forces you to write more unit testing code coverage to make up for the lack of a static compiler checking things for you. Raw performance is not good compared to golang or java.

When you start getting to a certain scale, developers are cheaper than your server costs in some cases. That is when something being performant is more worth it.

[ubernostrum]

All of these are decades-old talking points which have been largely shown to be factually incorrect. Why are you repeating them without justification?

[bpicolo]

And at that scale you can make additional microservices for the critical path where it matters.

[mahyarm]

Not really. You'll notice a pattern in most tech bigcos where they move from dynamic lang X to a statically typed language that can multithread properly.

A few examples: Ruby on rails to java (twitter). Java & c++ (google). Java (linked in). Python/Node -> Java/Go (uber). Or they start doing silly things like make a new VM (facebook).

[stuartaxelowen]

I heard through the grapevine that Go was only chosen at Uber to help with hiring.

[stock_toaster]

That seems silly. There are far more Java devs out there than Go devs.

Also, I would assume Uber probably has hiring problems in general at this point.

[sidlls]

> That seems silly. There are far more Java devs out there than Go devs.

I wouldn't underestimate the level of hype-driven development that exists in this area. "Chasing the new shiny" seems like it could be a line item in a resume, these days, sometimes.

[nailer]

There are more good Go devs. A lot of Java programmers are enterprise.

[mvid]

I would imagine that node would draw more enthusiasm than Go

[plafl]

I wonder if there is some survivor bias there. I'm sure there must be cases where everything went wrong but nobody writes about it.

[adrianratnapala]

Wouldn't survivor bias explain who BigCo X can be found using whatever questionable choice they originally made, but not explain why lots of BigCos have changed their practices.

This might explain Facebook and PHP, but it doesn't explain the stuff mentioned in the previous comment.

[bpicolo]

Google uses plenty of Python, no?

I don't think threading is a relevant factor for many of those decisions. Perf and static typing, sure.

[treebog]

Not a googler, but I have heard that most of the python at google is under Youtube, which Google got in an acquisition.

[crdoconnor]

From python to go and back again https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10402307 (mozilla)

[zepolen]

Don't be obtuse, it's not because of multithreading.

They move to static typed because their team is 100+ developers none of which knows the entire code base - and static typing helps lower the bugs possible.

[jrs95]

Plus Facebook has a lot of C++ and some Java services as well, in addition to the Hack/HHVM stuff.

[digitalzombie]

Linkedin was mostly scala and then they did some stuff with node.js >___>

Walmart also moved to node.js.

Hype was real.

[petre]

There is RoR for Jruby which has native threads, plus you can call Java methods from Ruby.

[crdoconnor]

"It's not statically typed, which can make working on a large codebase with more people more painful. It also forces you to write more unit testing code coverage to make up for the lack of a static compiler checking things for you."

I never missed static typing on large code bases but I had numerous bugs caused by python's implicit type conversions - string to iterable of characters ["h", "e", "l", "l", "o"], None to False, string "no" to True, 0 to False, "" to False, etc.

A lot of this mirrors C's infuriating implicit type conversions.

[brianwawok]

For what it is worth string to iterable char bugs happen to me plenty in scala. Hard problem to fix. Array of strings or string of chars?

[crdoconnor]

I don't think it is that hard. Simply stop making strings implicitly iterable and make chars a different type.