Is Python suitable for a huge, enterprise size app?

[Cameron Laird]

In article <1116430620.004234.187280 at f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
john67 <teamuhlig at gmail.com> wrote:
>The company I work for is about to embark on developing a commercial
>application that will cost us tens-of-millions to develop.  When all is
>said and done it will have thousands of  business objects/classes, some
>of which will have hundreds-of-thousands of instances stored in a DB.
>Our clients will probably have somewhere between 50-200 users working
>on the app during the day, possibly in mutiple offices, and then a
>large number of batch processes will have to run each night.  It will
>also need to have a web interface for certain users.  It needs to be
>robust, easy to maintain, and able to be customized for each client.
>
>Right now it looks like Java is the language of choice that the app
>will be developed in. However, I have been looking and reading a lot
>about Python recently and it seems to me that Python could handle it.
>The big attraction to me is the developer productivity.  It seems that
>if Python can handle it, then we could gain a huge savings by using
>Python instead of Java from a productivity standpoint alone.
>
>So, given the very general requirements in the first paragraph, do you
>think that Python could handle it?  If anyone has direct experience
>developing large apps in Python, I would appreciate your insight.
>Based on the responses I get, I am planning on writing a proposal to my
>management to consider Python instead of Java.
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My flippant response is that you'll need to choose Java if
you want it to cost that much.

Phaseit regularly develops applications that serve *thousands*
of users, with database record counts in the millions, and our
total costs are typically in the tens of thousands of dollars,
rather than tens of millions.

On the other hand, maybe I don't want you doing this in Python.
Most enterprise projects fail--or at least there's plausible
evidence to believe that most fail--and perhaps I shouldn't 
encourage Python's use in something that will fail.