>It's a great 0->1 language and great at simple glue, but eventually you hit a wall and have to keep investing larger and larger amounts of people or computing resources to get continued returns...
If you're a millionaire by that time, or have a strong established business, then it doesn't matter, it's a nice problem to have. Have your engineers have a go at it.
See: Dropbox, Disqus, AirBnB, and others...
And if you're not, then going from 0->100 in 2 years instead of 0->1 in a few months with Python wasn't worth it anyway (and you also don't have enough customers/users to make use of those 100x improvement).
A third possibility is you’re a team in a larger company, and then it could matter a lot.
I wrote a few things in what I’m pretty sure was correct, idiomatic, best-practices Python 3 and almost immediately I could see some familiar problems from my Perl days looming on the horizon, especially around testing, packaging and maintainability.
I enjoyed writing Python code and for the right kind of startup or hobby project I might use it in the future, but there is so much black-boxed weirdness in the ecosystem, so much inconsistency in paradigms, and so much temptation to “cheat” that I’d definitely think twice before committing a team to it. And I didn’t even get as far as the performance issues.
On the other hand, of course, you can opportunistically “move fast and break things” within a larger org too. But I worry that if you get too committed to Python, you will be unreasonably dependent on your lead engineers sticking around.
Also, pretty sure Python was called out as one of the main reasons why some hundred of Google Video engineers couldn't keep up with YouTube prior to Google's purchase.
Python might not be the most performant, but once you need the scale, it's a good problem to have because at that point, your product has already made it.
Sadly the page isn't available on Google Books anymore[0], you might still be able to get the book itself. There also might be a Hacker News thread on it too or it'll be on Reddit. It's one of those places I'll have seen it on.
I work as a consultant for companies with billions in revenue and from what I see it definitely matters. Re-writes simply don't happen that often. Maybe for the pure venture capital SV tech companies you mentioned, but many companies are not in that bucket.
Making good engineering choices from the beginning matters a lot.
Rewrites may not happen that often, but plenty of large-scale corporate tech projects flail for years without ever reaching a functional state.
If the choice is between a sub-optimally performant but working system, or a boondoggle that never gets off the ground, the “better engineering choice” is probably the former.
If you're a millionaire by that time, or have a strong established business, then it doesn't matter, it's a nice problem to have. Have your engineers have a go at it.
See: Dropbox, Disqus, AirBnB, and others...
And if you're not, then going from 0->100 in 2 years instead of 0->1 in a few months with Python wasn't worth it anyway (and you also don't have enough customers/users to make use of those 100x improvement).