Comment by boulos

You’re HN famous, Will!

But I disagree with this:

> Companies like Dropbox were able to build surprisingly large and scalable systems on just Python.

Many of Dropbox’s services are written in Go, and Magic Pocket is written (partly, at least) in Rust. Earlier in their development, Dropbox relied on S3, which is obviously not in Python.

Fundamentally, I think the important part of the “production” aspect of “systems programming” is that it’ll be used a lot. That’s what drives the requirement for efficiency: if you’re 10-100x less efficient, someone else will be more cost effective / solve bigger problems.

As an additional example, GitHub was written in Ruby, but that’s fine because the underlying Git and filesystem manipulation is all in C. The same thing is sort of true of Facebook’s world of PHP: PHP is mostly a wrapper around C libraries. Until it got complex enough that they rewrote the language.

tl;dr: I don’t think systems programming needs to be “low level”, but production systems do need to be efficient. More powerful computing just moves that further to the right!