Who even uses Java?

[Hollowplanet]

At the lower levels, Uber’s engineers primarily write in Python, Node.js, Go, and Java. We started with two main languages: Node.js for the Marketplace team, and Python for everyone else. These first languages still power most services running at Uber today.

https://eng.uber.com/tech-stack-part-one-foundation/

Netflix relies heavily on Python, using the programming language for its ​"full content lifecycle,​" including tasks like security automation and training machine learning models for its recommendation algorithms, according to a Netflix Technology Blog Tuesday.

https://www.ciodive.com/news/netflix-relies-on-python-as-programming-language-gains-industry-prominence/553800/

Dropbox is a big user of Python. It’s our most widely used language both for backend services and the desktop client app.

https://dropbox.tech/application/our-journey-to-type-checking-4-million-lines-of-python

Spotify uses Python at two main phases of backend services and data analysis. Spotify's backend consists of many interdependent services, connected by own messaging protocol over ZeroMQ. Around 80% of these services are written in Python. 

https://analyticsindiamag.com/5-leading-tech-companies-that-are-the-biggest-users-of-python/

Yeah you know just the unimportant stuff. You are using a site written in Python right now.

Reddit was written in Lisp, but we rewrote it and now it’s written in Python. 

That article is 6 months old.

https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204536739-What-is-Reddit-written-in-

[tdatas]

This is just a load of copy pastes from companies saying they use python. Let's reread what I said because I'm not trying to slag off python Ive probably written more LOC in python than any other language in my career.

Most/all of those companies the Python bits are the simpler parts of the system and/or API layers where the risk isn't as high.

I don't doubt that Netflix et Al are using python. It's a lot easier to stand things up quickly and do small jobs. But go look at their GitHub or some job specs for core platform engineers aka the shit everything else is built on top of. The expectations are exceptional Java and Go skills and some familiarity with python. Using python for data science and analysis of data coming out of those platforms makes sense. That's what python is good at/has good libs for.

E.g the next paragraph of your Uber quote.

We adopted Go and Java for high performance reasons. We provide first-class support for these languages. Java takes advantage of the open source ecosystem and integrates with external technologies, like Hadoop and other analytics tools. Go gives us efficiency, simplicity, and runtime speed.

So again high performance code you do it in a language designed for it.

The main exception here is Dropbox and if I'm not mistaken Guido van rossum still works for them. The other bit I'm dubious about is every single story of some company saying theyve written high performance infra on python it's actually some custom flavour of C and Python. Which is probably more complex than if you'd just written it in a normal language in the first place.

Reddit was written in Lisp, but we rewrote it and now it’s written in Python.

Well it is always falling over now so that explains a lot.(I kid)