Comment by robrenaud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robrenaud | Hacker News Reader

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What projects on the scale/complexity of Photoshop are implemented in Python? Possibly large chunks of Youtube or Dropbox?

I love Python for small scripts, and even don't regret it too much for programs with mild complexity (~5000 lines of Python), but the lack of explicit typing makes figuring out what any given function/class does pretty hard. What are the arguments? What do they do? What does the return type do? Where is this thing initialized? Finding the answers to those kinds of questions are greatly aided by an IDE/source code browsing that is anchored by types.

Yelp is a multi MLOC Python code base. AFAIK YouTube is slowly being ported from Python to Go.

There are plenty of other large codebases in dynamic languages:

  - Wikipedia and Facebook written in PHP
  - Twitter was originally written in RoR

To be honest, it's my personal opinion that good static languages (i.e. type inferenced) are better than dynamic languages. I believe it's situational compared to traditional static languages (e.g. Java, C++).

Both twitter and facebook ran into some pretty hard limits on those platforms which in the case of twitter led them to abandon RoR and in the case of Facebook led them to create a compiler for the language (doable on that 100M budget but still quite an undertaking).

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