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Python at Netflix

techblog.netflix.com

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Re: Python at Netflix

#41

Post by [deleted] »

irahul wrote: post #8
yellow wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pushing for more python use at my company as well. It's tough as everyone is drinking the ruby kool-aid. P.S. I really enjoyed your talk at QCon SF last year!

> It's tough as everyone is drinking the ruby kool-aid. Ruby and Python are similar in terms of execution speed and developer productivity. If your work requires something that Python has and Ruby doesn't(say numpy), then it might make sense; otherwise what would you accomplish by switching from Ruby to Python?

[deleted]

Re: Python at Netflix

#42

Post by mixmastamyk »

jonascopenhagen wrote: post #21
irahul wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's tough as everyone is drinking the ruby kool-aid. Ruby and Python are similar in terms of execution speed and developer productivity. If your work requires something that Python has and Ruby doesn't(say numpy), then it might make sense; otherwise what would you accomplish by switching from Ruby to Python?

what would you accomplish by switching from Ruby to Python? Simpler syntax?

A larger and more varied developer community, resulting in applicability to a wider range of problems.

Re: Python at Netflix

#43

Post by sigzero »

voidlogic wrote: post #38
Afforess wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had to guess, I would say because GP didn't actually give any real reasons why adding complexity (a new language) would improve or solve a problem. Advocating languages is fine, we all have our pet languages, but it is important to remember they each are just one tool in the toolbox and that what is more important is how the language solves the problem well, instead of just blindly advocating one language over a…

Language comparison are so ridiculously multi-dimensional and my knowledge of Netflix's internal applications are shallow enough I thought specifics would be a waste of time. I see Go in general as a reaction to the overcomplexity of Java/C++ and the performance issues of Python/Ruby. Since Go seems to be popular with people who use Java/Python, and Netflix uses Java/Python, I was curious if Go was on the table. I wo…

Some folks would consider this as an attempt to hijack the discussion. I am not saying that is what you are trying to do but what some folks would think. It gets tedious sometimes when the post is specifically about "Python at whatever" and people post "Hey you should use this language instead."

Maybe that is why you were down voted. (FWIW, I did not down vote you.)

Re: Python at Netflix

#44

Post by jedberg »

jkldotio wrote: post #39

Python really does hit a sweet-spot for many types of operations. Devops capacity in system scripting, crawling and scraping with excellent web frameworks (Django through to Bottle). On top of all that there are great machine learning libraries as well as good APIs to almost anything not written in Python. My site gets huge amounts of NLP, machine learning and information extraction done in just a few lines because o…

You know, it never occurred to me to use iPython as my shell. I think that would make me more productive. I'll have to try that, thanks!

Re: Python at Netflix

#45

Post by mixmastamyk »

netcraft wrote: post #13

Re: Web applications in python - I am curious about the overall feeling for them - Do you write web apps in python because rapid development makes up for any performance problems and if you run into problems you would rewrite it in something faster, or do you feel like a python web app can be just as good as alternatives when it comes to speed? Put another way - when you think of python for web applications / service…

I'm thinking pure speed is not a big differentiator these days... as long as it isn't horrible.

Why? The apps are mostly IO bound, and any large site is going to be caching, deferring slow operations, and sharding/breaking into tiers, cdns, etc, etc. The amount of time a web framework actually runs is relatively small.

Others have already mentioned what to do when performance is a problem.

Re: Python at Netflix

#46

Post by maxerickson »

brown9-2 wrote: post #35
tootie wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to say that after doing a python project I totally don't get why people love it so much. The syntax is slightly cleaner, but the lack of threading, first-class functions and dependency management tools make it waste at least as much time as it saves. I honestly don't believe in the concept of a programming language being able to make code more or less readable. A Java project with a POM file can be up and runn…

Python doesn't have first class functions?

I often get the idea that people confuse anonymous and first class functions (apparently because they discover the latter expressed in terms of the former).

Re: Python at Netflix

#48

Post by jkldotio »

jedberg wrote: post #44
jkldotio wrote: post #39

Python really does hit a sweet-spot for many types of operations. Devops capacity in system scripting, crawling and scraping with excellent web frameworks (Django through to Bottle). On top of all that there are great machine learning libraries as well as good APIs to almost anything not written in Python. My site gets huge amounts of NLP, machine learning and information extraction done in just a few lines because o…

You know, it never occurred to me to use iPython as my shell. I think that would make me more productive. I'll have to try that, thanks!

I have 'ipython --profile pysh' in my terminal's custom command, on servers I'm a bit more cautious and have a 'pu' (power up, or python up) command which is basically the first thing I type. You have to watch out for the shell history not working quite the same and that newly installed programs won't be seen until you do a '%rehashx'. Other than that it's pretty much all gravy. Now I just need to get around to transitioning to that python tiling window manager.

While I've got you, and seeing you are not longer at Reddit, what do you think of jkl.io (launched today)?

Re: Python at Netflix

#49

Post by herge »

frankwiles wrote: post #37
tootie wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to say that after doing a python project I totally don't get why people love it so much. The syntax is slightly cleaner, but the lack of threading, first-class functions and dependency management tools make it waste at least as much time as it saves. I honestly don't believe in the concept of a programming language being able to make code more or less readable. A Java project with a POM file can be up and runn…

Ummm, not sure where you're getting your information but Python has threads ( http://docs.python.org/2/library/threading.html ), first-class functions ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_function ), and dependency management tools (google for pip, easy_install, etc.)

I think he was talking about threads that run on multiple processors.

Also, packaging is a whole different can of worms (but hopefully will be sorted by distutils2!).

Re: Python at Netflix

#50

Post by lclarkmichalek »

sigzero wrote: post #43
voidlogic wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language comparison are so ridiculously multi-dimensional and my knowledge of Netflix's internal applications are shallow enough I thought specifics would be a waste of time. I see Go in general as a reaction to the overcomplexity of Java/C++ and the performance issues of Python/Ruby. Since Go seems to be popular with people who use Java/Python, and Netflix uses Java/Python, I was curious if Go was on the table. I wo…

Some folks would consider this as an attempt to hijack the discussion. I am not saying that is what you are trying to do but what some folks would think. It gets tedious sometimes when the post is specifically about "Python at whatever" and people post "Hey you should use this language instead." Maybe that is why you were down voted. (FWIW, I did not down vote you.)

I posted this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5356913 today as a reply to someone who commented about Go on a post about programming languages today. It seems that (at least so far) I was correct.
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