Re: Python versus Other Languages using PostgreSQL

On 8 May 2017 at 22:26, Paul Hughes <paul(at)vivation(dot)com> wrote:

> I noticed that most of the largest web platforms that use PostgreSQL as
> their primary database, also use Python as their primary back-end language.
> Yet, according to every benchmark I could find over the last couple of
> years, back-end languages like PHP, HHVM, and Node.JS outperform Python by
> 2x to 8x!
>
> So here are my questions:
>
> 1) Why do the largest web applications that use PostgreSQL also use
> Python, even though Python is significantly slower than it's biggest
> competitors?
>

​I've no experience of whether this is true. But in most cases, especially
web platforms, the speed of the language is almost irrelevant. Most
computers are fast enough these days that (for most applications) they
spend most of their time in IO_WAIT, whether you write your code in C or in
shell script. If you have strong experience in a particular language then
​you should use that language, and invest time in optimising your data
structures and developing faster algorithms.

Geoff