scaling problems

[James A. Donald]

I am just getting into python, and know little about it, and am
posting to ask on what beaches the salt water crocodiles hang out.

1.  Looks to me that python will not scale to very large programs,
partly because of the lack of static typing, but mostly because there
is no distinction between creating a new variable and utilizing an
existing variable, so the interpreter fails to catch typos and name
collisions.  I am inclined to suspect that when a successful small
python program turns into a large python program, it rapidly reaches
ninety percent complete, and remains ninety percent complete forever.

2.  It is not clear to me how a python web application scales.  Python
is inherently single threaded, so one will need lots of python
processes on lots of computers, with the database software handling
parallel accesses to the same or related data.  One could organize it
as one python program for each url, and one python process for each
http request, but that involves a lot of overhead starting up and
shutting down python processes.  Or one could organize it as one
python program for each url, but if one gets a lot of http requests
for one url, a small number of python processes will each sequentially
handle a large number of those requests.  What I am really asking is:
Are there python web frameworks that scale with hardware and how do
they handle scaling?

Please don't read this as "Python sucks, everyone should program in
machine language expressed as binary numbers".  I am just asking where
the problems are.
--
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We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because 
of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this 
right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.

http://www.jim.com/      James A. Donald