I do agree but that said, they actually built and ran this, and it worked. The world is filled with technically superior products that died.

Python is slow and Django is a beast. It's very expensive to scale to non-trivial usage. Great for productivity though. But you'll pay for that in your cloud bill.

Depends what your org is optimizing for. Are they optimizing for cost or speed of development? It’s a question I have to deal with on a daily basis when I here of yet again another “fast” tech to add to our stack.

> Are they optimizing for cost or speed of development?

Historically I would agree. There are options now that are both easy to develop in and are blazingly fast (C#, Go, Rust, Kotlin to name a few).

The elephant in the room is that both Ruby and Python fell behind in relative ease of use and computational performance with respect to other ecosystems and instead of addressing pressing matters there is a lot of mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance at play such as presenting false dichotomies.

100% agree.

I never experienced this mythical speed of development of Django or Rails, and I've been using both on/off for the last 15 years. Back then I was using stuff that was quite fast for development already.

But as soon as you have something moderately sized the slowness of languages like Python or Ruby becomes a problem for running tests, migrations, debugging, increased server costs, downtime, overhead in things like queues. I worked in some quite large projects though, so maybe for small stuff they work, but I absolutely hate them for writing big apps.

Like you said, the speed of development is IME fantastic with languages like Golang, C# or Node.js, and they don't suffer from the performance issues. Lots of companies local to me moving to Kotlin as well and my friends have only good things to say.

No, I feel the same.

Serving ecommerce sites with a couple of Java or .NET servers, backed by Oracle or SQL Server instances, surviving heavy load days like black Friday.

See Stackoverflow architecture, for example.

StackOverflow gets away with their arch because they have a much bigger read load than write load, and a design that can “hide” slow writes.

I would hazard a guess the Pinterest usage model has a somewhat higher write-load, and is more sensitive to slow writes/non-propagating writes.

Do I think their arch is still overkill? Yeah, do I think equating them with SO and friends is reasonable? No.

Still, the amount of servers is most likely a side effect of using Python as well.

The scaling issues we had with Tcl in the dot-com wave with our AOLServer clone, is one of the reasons why I wouldn't use something like Python.

Definitely.

There was a post on HN a couple of months back about Pinterest saving 2m/month on infra costs by swapping from Python to Elixir/Erlang. It copped flack in the comments because basically “ppphhh $2m that’s not even worth saving, how dumb, Python is good enough”.

> t copped flack in the comments because basically “ppphhh $2m that’s not even worth saving

When is anything worth doing then? Do people really think there's magic everywhere?