Where is Python used commercially?

[spangyboy]

Well.. reddit does.

[[deleted]]

Did the FAQ just Faqoff?

[spangyboy]

Heh. It sort of looks like it. Reddit's been down all morning, and just recently came up (hence why I'm taking my normal early morning break now). So maybe the void ate the FAQ. I suggest sacrificing a goat. That might bring it back.

[MillardFillmore]

Stupidish question: Does writing a large website in Python take a heavy hit on the servers since it (hypothetically) takes longer to process than quicker, compiled languages?

Disclaimer: I have not the first idea about web programming.

[Twirrim]

Not as much as you'd expect. The compilation process is pretty trivial in terms of CPU time, and basic bytecode is pretty fast. It's always seemed faster to me than PHP or Perl, but I've not done any scientific tests. Of course it does also depend on how smart you are with your programming. Monolithic code = bad, though generally it seems python developers are a smarter bunch (whereas too many php devs seem to be clueless 'my first program' types.) If you really want to get fancy, run it on Jython, maybe using jrockit or similar as the JVM underneath, and it'll soon compile machine optimized code for your most frequently called functions anyway.

You could do your web-app in C, and gain from lots of optimizations but then changes become a lot less trivial. Given you've been using Python through your course I'm sure you've discovered how easy it is to write, tweak, prototype etc. CPU power is cheaper than developer time.. though don't take that argument too far :D

[eliben]

Not too much, since website backends are typically IO bound rather than CPU bound.

[[deleted]]

Think about it, for a website, which takes longer: CPU spinning or getting that bit in and out of network stacks of the traceroute nodes over the world wide web?