[codetrotter]

NodeJS didn't even exist when Reddit started using Python, as far as I can tell.

Initial release of NodeJS was May 27, 2009; 14 years ago.

Swartz was involved in the development of Reddit until he departed from the company in 2007.

And we know that parts of the Python code for Reddit was written by Swartz.

[littlestymaar]

Wow, that sounds so early to adopt Python!

[xcv123]

Python was released in 1991.

[littlestymaar]

And Ruby in 1995, but it wasn't before 2005 (and Rails) that it reached traction. In 2007, albeit 16 years old, Python was still far from mainstream, especially out of its scripting niche.

[wk_end]

That doesn’t match my recollection. I’m not sure how to prove anything, but I’ll note that Python 3.0 was released in 2008. If Python 2 wasn’t already extremely popular and well-established at that point, I doubt we’d have seen the brutal 10+ish year migration from it.

[nostrademons]

It depends how you define "mainstream".

Python was definitely around, had a very strong community, and a number of very significant programs written in it. (Among them: the first versions of BitTorrent and Google.) However, if you were a random dev applying for a random job, you would most likely have to work in C++, Java, or C#. It was relatively difficult getting a job where you would write the majority of your code in Python. Certainly they existed, and many jobs would have you write small one-off scripts in Python, but the actual core product would usually be one of Java/C#/C++.

Remember that in 2009, Google had 20K employees while IBM (which was a major booster of Java) had 400K. And at Google, Python wasn't really allowed for major projects (Search had been rewritten from Python to C++ when it got big in 2000), so you'd be using Java or C++ anyway. Data science wasn't really a thing, and if you did machine learning you used frameworks like Weka or home-grown stuff.

[littlestymaar]

> I’m not sure how to prove anything, but I’ll note that Python 3.0 was released in 2008. If Python 2 wasn’t already extremely popular and well-established at that point, I doubt we’d have seen the brutal 10+ish year migration from it.

This is about the “scripting niche” I was talking about: in 2008 every Linux distro included Python and lots of build scripts were written in Python 2, but Python for the back-end was really rare back then.

[scrollaway]

Yeah python for the backend started taking off with Django, which only released 1.0 and picked up steam in 2008.

[js2]

That's not true. We were using Python 1.5.2 at a well-funded startup I was at from 2000-2007. We were an early cloud provider and maybe 1/3rd of our customers were using Python. This was in the 3-tier stack days and Zope was fairly popular for the application server.

The internal tooling we built was mostly in Python.

[grogenaut]

I'd used python on 3 commercial apps by 2007. One for Boeing, one for the navy one for an insurance company. Ruby was a little different. Ruby without rails had no real standards for making big apps. And I'm not sure when gems was made at rails con by Seattle ruby. Rails was for a long time a mega library for ruby... Ruby was missing a ton of features without rails. Similar but worse than a node web app versus working in a react app. No hot reload, no lib directory, many other features.