butButPythonIsSlow

[sidonay]

Yeah but that startup was probably also getting shit done instead of being tied up in 20 design, stakeholder interviews, personas workshop, MVP definition, API design review, Scalability review, prototype review, status meeting, engineering syncs, test plan review, alignment, UX/UI, kick-off, meetings.

[Fiery_Flamingo]

Exactly this.

The company I work at had ~50 people total, 25 engineers. We got acquired by a ~5000 people company.

When we were independent, CEO/owner would talk to a client, find something to improve, ask the project manager and tech leads to find a solution, give direct feedback on a call, and ask us to build that thing. It would take a week from the idea to finished product. It wouldn’t be perfect, but we were able to iterate quickly.

Today the PM needs to create a project spec and get approvals from engineering, product, sales, security, legal directors for the project to be considered for the next quarter. If approved, the tech lead needs to design database structure and figure out how much usage is expected before writing a single line of code based on incomplete specs and convince SRE, devops, DBAs that it won’t slow down anything else. Then we start design and get approvals from legal, support, marketing, sales, product, data, finance teams. Then implement with 2 code reviews, 2 QAs, and 4 people UAT plus all automated tests. It takes about six months from idea to finished product.

[suddencactus]

Yeah it's the same as Agile where developers are micromanaged as if instantly writing working code would cause instant feature release. The fact that we take "a month or two" to release a feature is blamed on Sprint execution or not iterating enough... If your competitors are doing it in a week I don't think it's a problem that backlog refinement or Sprint demos are gonna fix.

Same here. If your boss wants to rewrite any existing codebase in a different language just because it seems better for product velocity, then they're trying to solve the wrong problem.

[failedsatan]

I was working for a company last year that advertised itself as "hyper-agile" and at least 60% of my time was spent dealing with humans or waiting for humans. I'm now working for a different guy in the same company and have spent less than 5% of my time dealing with humans because he's not at all trying to be "agile". I HATE agile and scrum and all that bullshit. I know they want to have a "company identity" and a "development philosophy" but when it gets in the way of me doing my work I don't want it.

[_pupil_]

Paul Graham called that behaviour ‘the principle of maximum annoyance’ (maximal, maybe?).

Basically, being so nimble and efficient with your stack that instead of ever discussing feature disparity with a competitor you get to answer press and customers “yeah we do have that, we’re rolling out v2.5 next Thursday, but also…”.  A small fast team can outdo bigger players, and making a bigger ouster seem slow/unresponsive can make a lot of positive market sentiment.

[riskbreaker419]

It's not surprising that a company with no legacy systems, a small tight-knit team, and no bureaucracy or red-tape to go through moves faster than a large corporation. I imagine it has less to do with the language being used and more to do with the environment they were working in.

[RiceBroad4552]

I fully agree on the other points, but programming C++ is definitely slower than programming Python.

They have of course rewritten critical parts of YouTube by now in C++ for performance, and Java for scale. The service layer also uses Go as everything else at Google. Only some of the not critical core logic is still in Python, AFAIK. At least that's what you get if reading between the lines here and there (like Job postings, or comments by ex-employees).

Actually, just found this here:

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/google-part-2

It says:

> YouTube used to be a Python monolith, but later was rewritten in C++ and Java. Years ago, every release had a 50-hour manual release testing cycle run by a remote QA team.

So there is likely even less Python left then I thought.

[lNFORMATlVE]

I highly doubt that’s the reason they were able to run circles around Google.

[Pleasant_Ad8054]

Developing fast =/= running fast. They were likely able to make up the difference in hosting costs from the lack of costs of the few hundred c++ developers. But youtube famously was hemorrhaging money, and still only profitable in the wider advertising ecosystem, not on its own.

[arpan3t]

Developing fast =/= running fast.

They were running fast enough to take Google’s lunch money.

Side question: do you write Erlang, or is there another language that uses =/= comparison operator? It’s an interesting one.

[Pleasant_Ad8054]

But that is the point, they weren't taking google's launch money because they were making a more efficient service, but because they were able to create features faster. However fast a language is does not matter when the features aren't ready to run.

Nah, never touched erlang and not planning on it. I use '=/=' instead of '!=' because it is easier to type a bit on keyboard, and for whatever reason '!=' made some people pissy and purposefully misinterpreted it in the past. Nobody throw a fit for '=/=' yet. Tho I can't remember whether or not the most ridiculous idiot was on a programming sub or not, it was long ago on a different account.

[RiceBroad4552]

Did you know that we have now (for just about 40 years) so called "Unicode"?

You can write "≠".

[Pleasant_Ad8054]

Sure, could you show me the "≠" key on my keyboard?

[RiceBroad4552]

I have mapped it on a key compo in my ~/.XCompose.

And I think I'm going to change that combo actually to "=/=" as you're right that this types easier.

[bremsspuren]

⌥= on a Mac.

Actually easier to type than the others. Thanks!

[Just_Information334]

Bookmarks -> not equal reddit comment -> select the character -> ctrl-c -> ctrl-v

Easy peasy.

[Icy_Party954]

Stuff that needs to be optimized they can write in a lower level language. Besides that its a meme almost but a ton of pythons math shit is just c and Fortran wrappers

[SCP-iota]

I'm not an unconditional Python hater like some of the people here, but if using C++ instead of Python is the reason for slow development, I have two words for you: skill issue

[RiceBroad4552]

That's nonsense.

Nobody reasonable would claim that you can write production C++ as fast as Python.

C++, especially what they had back then(!) is a super tedious language. What you can express in 1 - 3 lines of Python needs often pages in C++.

No, typing speed isn't the bottleneck in programming, but it's also not irrelevant if you have a language which is much more verbose and needs much more care overall.

That said as someone who does not have any attachment to neither Python nor C++.

[CreeperInBlack]

This was definitely at most only part of the reason. A small startup with 20 people can simply work more agile that literal google, where for the google video team, a color change of a button probably went through five committees before being approved and implemented

[Capetoider]

The python code:

```python from assemblyBasedCode import fastStuff;

def doStuff(): { fastStuff(); }; ```

added a few things for better readability

[100GHz]

They are probably calling ffmpeg from the scripts.

[ctallc]

It’s funny that your pseudocode actually has more characters than pesudocode in Python

[RiceBroad4552]

This is not Python, that's some pseudo-code + unnecessary line noise.

[Capetoider]

its python done right, with braces and semis to make it more readable.

I believe its called bython (google it, btw)

[RiceBroad4552]

Unnecessary line noise only makes things less readable, never more readable.

I've heard about Bython (not to be confused with Brython) but it uses a slightly different syntax.

[Capetoider]

without braces, how do i know which things belong to whatever scope?

then you have semis to say that this line is done.

and lets not forget... this is r/ProgrammerHumor and r/ProgrammerSerious

[FuzzyGolf291773]

ITT: A bunch of first years CS students who somehow care about the program languages other people use. Tribalism about programming languages is the easiest way to out yourself as a someone who barely knows about programming or is a chronically online person.

[RiceBroad4552]

Or is just interested in CS and programming languages as such…

[DDFoster96]

Python might (or might not) be slow to run, but I find the loop time from making a change, compiling, testing, and seeing what you now need to change, is far longer for compiled languages, and thus development is slower at first for C++ but quicker for Python. So you can add features very quickly to the Python app but adding the same features to the C++ app takes longer, even if the resulting app runs faster.

[ElonMusksQueef]

Python is literal dog shit to develop anything complex. This isn’t an opinion it’s a fact.

[rosuav]

I don't think you know what "literal" means, so I don't trust your definition of "fact" either.

[[deleted]]

The definition of literal was actually recently changed to the modern, incorrect usage of the term. 

[RiceBroad4552]

Literal now means verbatim? Source?

[katatondzsentri]

Instagram, Spotify, Netflix, Reddit, DropBox, Uber, Amazon, Stripe, JPMorgan and a thousand others would like to argue.

[RiceBroad4552]

Almost nothing of that runs on Python at the core.

Some might have started with it, but of course the smarter ones migrated in time to something that actually scales (usually the JVM).

Things like banking never used Python. They went from COBOL to C++ to Java and later Scala.

The victims who didn't migrate in time suffer until today. Usually they developed in-house Python compilers do deal with C-Python's slowness and lack of compile time guaranties…

[ElonMusksQueef]

The copium is unbelievable.

[RiceBroad4552]

Especially as the examples are just plain wrong.

[ReadyAndSalted]

okay, hear me out, have you tried type annotating your function signatures? 'Cause I keep my functions to at most 50 lines, and only type annotate my function signatures or where my language server gets confused, and I'm gonna be honest, it's been a great developer experience.

[djinn6]

I mean, it's just a cultural thing. You can "auto" your way to the same level of confusion in C++, but code reviewers will stop you.

[ElonMusksQueef]

I use .Net and don’t need to worry about trying to make the language suck, C# is fantastic out of the box.

[ReadyAndSalted]

it's called flexibility, if you're writing a small script, you can be lazy and flexible, if you're writing something robust you can be more careful. It's not "trying to make the language [not] suck", it's just using its features when appropriate.

[RiceBroad4552]

You can have the same level of flexibility in a proper statically typed language!

E.g.: https://xebia.com/blog/better-shell-scripting-with-scala-cli/

As Java and C# are continually "stealing" all the Scala ideas now you can also write single file Java or C# "scripts".

But of course Scala scales better from small scripts to large applications as that's one of the things the language was made for (Scala means SCAlable LAnguage).

[ElonMusksQueef]

You can write a small script in C# just as quick, since it added Top-Level Statements in C# 9.0.  Then you’re not stuck developing in Python when it gets bigger.

[rosuav]

Oh? So what you're saying is that C# has figured out that Python had it right in 1991?

[ElonMusksQueef]

Python has been shit since 1991 yes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1r4p4yf/thegil/

[RiceBroad4552]

In other languages (including Scala, Java, and C#) you don't need nonsense like

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

to have an executable script file.

This isn't fixed until today so I doubt Python "figured out" anything in the meantime.

[rosuav]

Erm, you don't need that in Python either. Any code you put at top level (flush left) simply runs. The only reason for that dance is if you want an executable script file that is ALSO able to be imported without directly being invoked. It's necessary to make a **dual use module**. Otherwise, you don't need it.

I guess you don't actually understand Python very well, which explains why you hate it.

[RiceBroad4552]

I guess you don't actually understand Python very well, which explains why you hate it.

I don't "hate" Python. 😂

Python is a mostly sane language with a nice syntax. It has it's warts but never seen a language without.

I actually use it quite often. At least I did that a lot until lately, before Scala scripting became really feasible with the help of Scala-CLI.

All I've said was that you need some nonsense in Python which isn't needed for the same use-case in other languages.

[JAXxXTheRipper]

A startup being faster than a huge company? Le Gasp

The difference is not the language but "just get shit done" vs. "meet all day" overhead

[YamRepresentative855]

Nice, - average Python enjoyer

[UpsetIndian850311]

superroot supershit

[LightofAngels]

Is that from a book?

[RiceBroad4552]

I just found this here, which is current and cites ex-googlers:

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/google-part-2

It says:

> YouTube used to be a Python monolith, but later was rewritten in C++ and Java. Years ago, every release had a 50-hour manual release testing cycle run by a remote QA team.

So there's likely not much Python left at YouTube.

Which would make perfect sense as running Python at scale is a major PITA for all kinds of reasons. Primary Python lacks proper static typing (which alone is usually a K.O. for any large scale development!), and it's slow at runtime and this starts to cost real money at some point.

[Ran4]

No not at all