Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

It's really strange to me how people continue to build services using python, knowing it is 100 times slower than appropriate languages, and then get surprised by it being 100 times slower, so they eventually rewrite it.



It’s extremely rare for a system to be 10x slower, much less 100x, and developer productivity is huge. When you see huge numbers being tossed around for an entire system, they almost always mean “our first architecture wasn’t right for the problem” and the question to ask is how much time it would have taken the same team to discover the correct shape of the problem with the other candidates.


I think it is a lack of know-how. Most businesses/managements are not capable of making the decision to go for an ecosystem like Elixir, because they either don't even know it exists (that is also true for many devs) or they do not dare to do anything non-conventional or non-mainstream, or they have the wrong impression, that the "programming language does not matter". (Well, it does! Since it connects you to an ecosystem that comes with it and its language design choices influence how easily you can do things ...)

So then Python comes along and you find loads of devs for that. Once Python is entrenched, businesses have a hard time telling their devs to actually learn something new. And few devs will already explore things like Elixir on their own in their free time. And so they continue to hire Python devs.

(One could also replace "Python" with "Java" or "NodeJS" or similar, the principles remain the same.)




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: