| As I see it, most sites don't need the hardware they're allocated. If you want to sleep on the weekend, you need at least two and probably three servers. That is almost certainly in the realms of 10x what most applications actually need. So a language that is 10x slower than C isn't a big deal. CherryPy fits nicely into this window of opportunity, but as soon as you have to go back to your boss and say "I think we need a bigger boat" someone should be asking questions about library and language choices, at the very least there should be a conversation about prototypes vs production architectures. Similarly, Python and the dynamic languages are 'fast enough' because in the 90s the bottleneck was IO, not CPU. That is still true, but is becoming less true. SSDs rapidly closed that gap, and it looks like memristor storage could mean that non-volatile RAM is as large as SSD and as fast as DRAM is today. The dynamic language decision to focus on single threaded performance is also smart, but that will stop being true when CPU have hundreds of cores, instead of 10s. Synchronized access to cache is 100x slower than regular access. So to see benefit for work loads other than the "embarrassingly parallel" with multi-core you need around 100 threads. The new competition in the CPU market might see the first 100 core die on the market in 5 years. The trend towards 'serverless' could be even worse for dynamic/interpreted languages. Smaller slices of billing will show that the same service written in Java vs Python cost 5-10x less. That was harder to show when you had to pay for at least two servers for every deployed service, now it will be very clear to CFOs how much language choice affects their bottom line. What this means is that the perceived difference in performance between Java and Python can only grow over the next 5-10 years. If Java continues to gross you out, I'd be looking to pad your resume with something like Clojure / Go / Rust. High productivity, high performance languages are here and their relevance is growing. |