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Thinking that the stack/language is not intrinsically tied to the problem and smart ass quotations define reality is the bigger problem. Go use Python for your triple A next gen game rendering engine.
Go use Nodejs + typescript for it. Why pick on just Python?
All in all we’re mostly talking about the web stack.
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The Python stack is a huge wart. First performance is shit. Second type checking is shit. The only benefit is familiarity and data science. That’s literally it. No one in this thread has stated any benefit Python brings to the table on top of other popular web application languages. I guess ruby is a worse choice.
having built two enterprise data platforms in python, I can't disagree more. for a startup, development velocity matters more than code performance especially for a CRUD app even at medium scale. Frameworks like Django simply enable you to do so much and so quickly. and you can reach world scale, that's what Instagram did!
Django is fast but has become much less relevant in the age of AI. The issue with Django is you hit issues very early. Within 2 to 3 years of using Django the warts of using Django become apparent. Django is mostly a good tool for the first year, but if the tool survives beyond that, Django becomes more of a liability.
You get 80 percent of the convenience of Django with just popular nodejs libs like prisma, zod and express. Once you add in LLS it’s 100 percent.
Hiring middle-management from large companies has to be the biggest startup killer. Doubly so if they are mediocre to start with and triple so if they bring with them their legion of yes-men.
Python is an anti pattern. Nodejs + typescript is superior across almost every dimension other than data science and familiarity. People think it’s apples and oranges but it’s not. Also don’t forget golang too. If your app is Python in the beginning then you’re pretty much locked in. It’s doable, but you’re going to be dealing with a lot of Python specific warts.
Wow. I cannot believe in good ‘ol 2026 there are still people who believe a whole successful programming language could be the reason for a failed experiment (startup). If your startup is solving a real problem, choosing the “wrong” language could never be the reason it fails.
Choosing a wrong language can be a factor for failure. This is possible but rare. For example choosing Python for a triple A game engine.
Mostly choosing the wrong language results in pain and friction and extra work. These things are enough for me to consider a choice wrong. You don’t need the language to bring down the entire startup for me to consider to to be wrong.
For example if you chose nodejs. One application server instance is enough to serve the website and scale for a couple years. If you chose flask… well… setting that up for the same scale would be complicated. Your choice here is proportional to the amount of pain you feel later.
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Any stack has its own warts.
The Python stack is a huge wart. First performance is shit. Second type checking is shit. The only benefit is familiarity and data science. That’s literally it. No one in this thread has stated any benefit Python brings to the table on top of other popular web application languages. I guess ruby is a worse choice.
I personally avoid to touch anything that is nodejs related because I do not trust its ecosystem (npms).
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I've seen a startup with 10 devs + 60+ microservices and growing. The team was stuck in a mindset that they just hadn't split things up enough to arrive at nirvana.
Been there before - I worked at a company where some geniuses thought that microservices would solve all of our scaling issues. We ended up with four microservices just to send an email (one to template, one to send, one to persist to database and one other which I can't remember now).
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"Big companies mostly seem to use the microservice(s) per team model. " I am good with that. What we often see is 10 microservices per team of 3 devs. And ideally using the same database.
Multiple services using the same database will typically end poorly. When schemas or indexes change, how will that affect all of the different services? How do their read/write patterns differ? When one service needs to scale, will the additional connections starve the other services? And worse, if a service ends up moving to a different team or department, who controls the database? I prefer a service that fronts th…
It's absolutely horrible. Now all the services are tightly coupled without the devs really realizing this. And the side effects of database changes can be super subtle and hard to predict.
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The Python stack is a huge wart. First performance is shit. Second type checking is shit. The only benefit is familiarity and data science. That’s literally it. No one in this thread has stated any benefit Python brings to the table on top of other popular web application languages. I guess ruby is a worse choice.
I don't see how it's a bad choice on its own merit. Lang choice will always be a mixture of familiarity (team or individual) and niche problem needs (some edge cases need specific tools). I personally avoid to touch anything that is nodejs related because I do not trust its ecosystem (npms).
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Been there before - I worked at a company where some geniuses thought that microservices would solve all of our scaling issues. We ended up with four microservices just to send an email (one to template, one to send, one to persist to database and one other which I can't remember now).
That sounds like like they could just have used AWS Lambda instead of microservices.