Why did Quora choose Python for its development?

[Beliavsky]

I thought this essay on why one startup chose Python was interesting.

http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Quora-choose-Python-for-its-development

PHP was out of the question. Facebook is stuck on that for legacy
reasons, not because it's the best choice right now.[1] Our main
takeaway from that experience is that programming language choice is
very important and is extremely costly to change.

Python was a language that Charlie and I both knew reasonably well
(though I know it a lot better now than I did when we started). We
also briefly considered C#, Java, and Scala. The biggest issues with
Python are speed and the lack of typechecking.

C# seemed pretty promising. As a programming language, it's great,
but:

•We didn't want to be on the Microsoft stack. We were up for learning
something new, and MS SQL Server actually seemed pretty good, but we
knew we'd need to integrate with lots of open source code that has
only second-class support for .NET, if it supports it at all. Also,
most of the best engineers these days are used to open source stuff.
•We didn't want to take the risk of being on Mono (an open source
implementation of C#/.NET). It's not clear how long funding will be
around for that project, and I'd heard of various performance
problems. Plus, it seemed like everything else in the C# ecosystem
would assume we were on the Microsoft stack.

For a lot of little reasons, Java programs end up being longer and
more painful to write than the equivalent Python programs. It's also
harder to interoperate with non-Java stuff. Scala had a lot of the
downsides of Java and the JVM, although it wasn't quite as bad. The
language seemed a little too new and like it would bring some
unnecessary risk (for example, who knows how good will support be in
10 years).

Two other languages we very briefly thought about were OCaml and
Haskell (neither had big enough ecosystems or good enough standard
libraries, and both were potentially too hard for some designers/data
analysts/non-engineers who might need to write code).

We decided that Python was fast enough for most of what we need to do
(since we push our performance-critical code to backend servers
written in C++ whenever possible). As far as typechecking, we ended up
writing very thorough unit tests which are worth writing anyway, and
achieve most of the same goals. We also had a lot of confidence that
Python would continue to evolve in a direction that would be good for
the life of our codebase, having watched it evolve over the last 5
years.

So far, we've been pretty happy with the choice. There's a small
selection bias, but all of the employees who'd been working with other
languages in the past have been happy to transition to Python,
especially those coming from PHP. Since starting the following things
have happened:


•Python 2.6 got to the point where enough of the libraries we used
were compatible with it, and we made a very easy transition to it.
•Tornado (web framework) was released as open source, and we moved our
live updating web service to that.
•PyPy got to the point where it looks like it will eventually be
usable and will give us a significant speedup.

All together, these give us confidence that the language and ecosystem
is moving in a good direction.

[1] What are the horrors of PHP? and Do Facebook engineers enjoy
programming in PHP? and Why hasn't Facebook migrated away from PHP?
and What are some of the advantages of PHP over other programming
languages? for more on that.
Via Nizameddin Haşim Ordulu and JR Ignacio.