[phire]

I'm not sure why python was chosen.

But I contributed a tiny bit of code to reddit back when it was open source and chatted with reddit engineers on IRC, so I do know the official justification (as of 2010ish) for reddit sticking with python:

Websites are mostly IO bound anyway. The hot parts like markdown formatting and templating are already c modules. So the performances gain for rewriting in a compiled language aren't large enough to justify it.

[Baeocystin]

That seems reasonable to me, even today. Am I off-base?

[vlakreeh]

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]

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]

> 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]

With Python it doesn't take abuse. You blink and the bloody thing rots away.

[pphysch]

Relative to what other language?

[dilap]

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?

[veave]

reddit never cared much about performance, they blame it on IO but they chose to use cassandra, they used it as a key value store, then they put python on top of it, with the result that most pages would take seconds to generate and the website would go down almost every day.

With the "new" reddit they replaced most of the frontend with javascript and it really shows. That's not to say I like sites that use too much javascript but python is slow enough just parsing and filling html templates, seemingly.